Little Chef

http://www.littlechef.co.uk
Database design, markup, CMS & front-end programming

Little Chef is one of the most recognisable UK brands and a firm staple of roadside and motorway services. Facing tougher competition and financial tribulations, Little Chef decided to relaunch their website as part of a larger commercial initiative. With a clean slate and a potentially large audience, Iris was charged with giving the existing Little Chef brand a fresher and more inclusive feel.

With only a skeletal site structure, the rebuild of the website involved pushing the new, healthier food menu more and also trying to gather sign-ups to the “Friends of Little Chef” campaign which encompassed a mailing list and a user area with access to special offers. Available on the old site, the “Find a Little Chef” feature was also to return with more powerful search options and also include support for popular Satellite Navigation systems.

Friends of Little Chef

Before the relaunch of the new website and the moth-balling of the existing one, an interim holding page was put up to try and gauge the level of interest in the new site development. This was the genesis of the mailing list which would become “Friends of Little Chef”. The registration process verified a users’ e-mail address as a precautionary method to prevent sign-up saturation which, in future, may skew some of the upcoming offers.

The new site enhanced this mailing and allowed registrants to log in to give them access to special deals. The process had to provide all of the expected features to a user such as resending of the authorisation e-mail, resetting their password and ultimately allowing them to amend their saved details.

The offers were going to be distributed only through the website which presented a new set of problems. While it would be impossible to fully prevent people printing out and using the vouchers multiple times, the client wanted to be able to hinder this practice as much as possible and also chart the extent of this kind of behaviour. The solution involved personalising and keying the printable vouchers: clearly displaying the patron’s name and address as well as a unique code, generated once for each user. This arrangement had numerous benefits: each voucher could be traced back to the website user opening up a range of data-tracking possibilities, the personalisation would suggest that vouchers only be used once and the number of voucher codes would succinctly indicate how many users had accessed the offer.

All of this statistical information would be invaluable to Little Chef and part of the build involved educating them on the extent to which the information could be used under current legislation.

Find a Little Chef

The concept behind the “Find a Little Chef” section of the website was to allow visitors easy access to a useful route planner for driving indicating restaurant locations along the route (a so-called “corridor search”) and also to allow users to see the closest restaurant locations to a given point. The previous website had used a bespoke solution which obviously was no longer available to us; after a brief search it turned out that MultiMap (partnered with Microsoft Mappoint) provided a robust and fully featured web-service that we could build upon.

Using the built-in PHP5 module for SOAP communication and a bespoke PHP Mappoint API, it was possible to access the full range of Mappoint functions and retain maintainability, something difficult to achieve with the alternative of declarative programming and PHP4. Beginning with the basic functions of route finding and radial searching allowed me to build up to more advanced options, eventually incorporating route charting via a location and property based matching e.g. whether a restaurant location had WiFi or not.

This sort of programming was certainly challenging and was one of the high points of the build as not only did it involve integrating with an established web service, but the programming flow was very different to anything I had encountered before. Certain aspects such as geocoding presented some unique problems, helped along by the extensive documentation and helpful MultiMap personnel.

CMS and Training

A large part of the build, both before and after launch, involved liaising with members of the Little Chef customer support team (based in Sheffield) who would be fielding queries from the public regarding the website and also using the CMS day-to-day. This iterative process revealed a lot of common problems whose solutions could be aided through several additions to the application. Most of the queries revolved around customer accounts and the “Friends of Little Chef” section so a detailed user manager was built which allowed for wildcard user searching and a detailed view of a user’s status as well as standard actions such as editing and deletion.

The CMS also allowed the client to manage both news and restaurant vacancies; again, these features were iteratively improved and expanded upon through constant feedback from the people who would be using the system regularly; this meant the application was precisely what was required rather than a best-guess.

Overall

The Little Chef website was of an entirely different nature to any website that I had dealt with before. Not only is it highly commercial, but the process used to build the site differed greatly. Ordinarily requirements capture comes first, then the application build, then product launch, the so-called waterfall methodology; as mentioned above, the cyclical nature of presentation and refinement meant the final result was far better suited to the client’s requirements, despite the extra build time involved.

The site also presented other unique challenges such as the web service integration of the route finder and the water-tight process required for user sign-ups and feedback forms. With each new promotion that is put on the site (most recently a “Kids eat free” offer) the time to delivery is reduced and the statistical feedback is more relevant.

In all, the Little Chef site provided a refreshing change of pace and a new set of challenges and I’m pleased that the set of possibly disparate features are able to work so well together in one site.