The Woodhouse Day Spa

By jorgenson_chris on 17 April 2014

Unleashed Technologies developed an enterprise platform that easily scales to accommodate The Woodhouse Day Spa’s explosive growth, as they take the company from 30 to more than 200 franchises. The Woodhouse Day Spa can now instantly create franchise sites that are consistent in branding and content, yet managed and updated by the franchisee. All sites for The Woodhouse Day Spa are fully integrated into spa management systems to provide a seamless experience to visitors. The Drupal platform developed for The Woodhouse Day Spa brings usability and control to its franchisees in order to increase engagement and improve ROI.

The Woodhouse Day Spa website won the 2013 Blue Drop Award for Drupal Site of the Year.

Visit woodhousespas.com →

Why Drupal was chosen:

Drupal was chosen for its flexibility and robust content control capabilities. Leveraging Drupal 7, Unleashed Technologies was able to develop an enterprise platform that would empower The Woodhouse and its franchisees to control and manage their content, unify all sites by integrating key systems, and increase revenues through improved user experience and SEO capabilities.

Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome):

The Woodhouse had many sites for franchises, but those sites weren't unified in branding, easily updated or integrated into their spa management systems. The Woodhouse Day Spa website wasn't delivering the high quality experience its visitors expected and limited their franchisees' online capabilities.

Lack of Control or Integration

The Woodhouse had no ability to make global changes, which was impacting their ability to provide consistent branding as they grew and more and more franchise sites were added. Additionally, franchise owners were unable to make changes to much of the content on their individual sites. Franchisees could not update their own blog posts, news items, pricing, photo galleries or even event schedules. When changes were able to be made, they had to go through corporate IT to edit the custom code and were subject to change fees to support that work. Because of the burden this placed on corporate resources, these updates, no matter how time sensitive, could take days.

In addition, franchise owners had no ability to manage their own, local search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. They had no ability to target local markets through SEO or to leverage search engine marketing if they wished to.

Highly Manual Processes

Though gift cards were available for online purchase, they could not be purchased through the local franchise sites. Instead, gift cards could only be purchased through the corporate site, forcing visitors to leave the franchise site in order to complete the transaction. Gift card fulfillment was not automated and required a full-time employee to manually process each purchase.

Without control, integration or automation, The Woodhouse Day Spa could not keep up with its rapidly growing business. They needed a central platform that would enable them to maintain and update franchise sites as well as the corporate site, and also provided the ability for franchises to manage content on each of their sites. The Woodhouse Day Spa turned to the Bates Creative Group to create a high-impact design for the new web presence and Unleashed Technologies to develop a robust platform built on Drupal to help them meet their objectives.

Requirements:

With this Drupal-based platform, Unleashed Technologies was required to deliver:

Instant franchise site creation capabilities
The ability for The Woodhouse corporate site administrators to push content to and pull content from franchise sites
Tiered levels of access at the corporate and franchise levels to ensure the right people have control over content
Real-time web services for continual content sharing
Comprehensive integration into spa management systems
Technical best practices for SEO management
Integration into spa management systems to provide a seamless experience to visitors
Fully customizable gift cards available for purchase from franchise sites

Outcome:

Unleashed Technologies improved site management and developed key integrations that now enable The Woodhouse and its franchisees to:

Ease content management across all websites for corporate employees and franchisees with tiered levels of access to ensure brand consistency and timely updates
Reduce costs by eliminating manual gift card processes
Increase revenue with online reservation booking, and the ability to target local markets through SEO/SEM
Improve engagement with social media functionality, wish lists, blogs, news feeds, photo galleries and event schedules
Continue to innovate on a technologically advanced, highly flexible platform

Building on the high impact design provided by Bates Creative Group, all sites are fully integrated into spa management systems to provide a seamless experience to visitors. With this enterprise web platform, The Woodhouse Day Spa can now instantly create franchise sites that are consistent in branding and content, yet managed and updated by the franchisee. With this enterprise web platform, The Woodhouse is able to better engage web visitors and successfully grow the business.

Technical specifications

Drupal version:

Drupal 7.x

Key modules/theme/distribution used:

Drupal services JS

Field Permissions

Taxonomy Access Control

Ubercart

Features

Ultimate Cron

Views Bulk Operations (D8)

Nodequeue

Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen:

Drupal 7 was chosen primarily for its flexibility to enable The Woodhouse Day Spa to have the control and functionality it requires as the business grows. A custom theme was developed for The Woodhouse Day Spa to support the high impact design provided by Bates Creative.

What follows are the reasons for choosing the key modules used in the creation of this site:

Drupal Services - Services allowed us to use the REST API to synchronize content from the main corporate site to the franchise sites. With the REST calls, two-way communication between the multiple franchise sites and the corporate site is possible, enabling content to be pushed in either direction for message consistency.
Field Permissions - This module enables The Woodhouse Day Spa to control at the corporate level what content franchises can add or edit down to individual fields on nodes.
Taxonomy Access Control - With the TAC module, corporate now has the ability to push content to the franchise sites it selects and empower its franchises to make changes to specific nodes if it wishes them to. Editing with approval, without approval, or with notification can be enabled - or editing can be completely restricted.
Ubercart - Ubercart was chosen because of its ease of use and flexibility as the eCommerce engine for the online sale of gift cards across all sites.
Drupal Features - Drupal Features was incorporated in order to keep all settings and modifications unified across multiple sites. The Woodhouse Day Spa is rapidly growing with an anticipated 200 new franchise sites in the coming year, Drupal Features will help to keep those sites consistent without manual intervention.
Ultimate Cron - This module was chosen in order to keep tasks and updates being made to potentially hundreds of franchise sites running in the background instead of impacting the main corporate site. With this module, The Woodhouse Day Spa can continue to grow without impacting user experience.
Aegir - Though not a true module, Aegir was essential to the development of The Woodhouse platform. With Aegir, we were able to empower The Woodhouse to instantly spawn new franchise sites from the corporate site.