SWiM Communications is a digital agency that provides web-based and digital services. They needed an online portal to help track their customers, jobs, recurring items and support tickets.

Initially, the database needed to be built, it required a large amount of planning and mapping out. The data that they wanted to collect was already established and was being collected via other sources. The key was to build the database in a way that it could easily collect from these external sources. Once a baseline was established for the system next came the base function of the site.

The functionality was fairly simple, data would get entered into a form which was then submitted and added to the database. The complexity that had to be built was the automated processes. Things like, when a job was completed an invoice was automatically raised and alerted the accounts department or a support ticket was raised and then the development team had to be notified of the issue and that there was a new ticket.

The last two aspects of the site were the statistics and staff access. Both of these were just as important as each other as the statistics were about the staff or entered by the staff. They needed to see how much time their staff had worked in any given week (for payroll) as well as which clients needed to be charged for those hours. This would then give them a graph or a statistic on if they need to increase the team or bring in more work.

The whole system was built in Codeignitor and Bootstrap. The overall difficulty with the project was the changing landscape brought upon by the owner. The system and the development team had to constantly change to fit these changing demands.