Chethane Nanayakkara, owner of Ritzy Automart using the site
The owner of Ritzy Automart, Chethane Nanayakkara identified the significance of an online presence, even for a car dealership. With the opening of their dealership in Yakkala, Sri Lanka, they also unveiled their website, ritzyautomart.com. Chethana handed the huge responsibility of designing their site to OrpheusHQ. Our newest member, Ruchila, successfully completed the web design for the site within a couple of weeks.
Ruchila continued using WordPress to do the web design. This approach has proved to be both fast and reliable in the past. We chose a hosting service that suits the budget, speed and storage requirements of our client.
The web design incorporates a page with extensive vehicle search including brand, transmission type, color and a price range slider. The website adorns a lot of images as we understand that people like to see what they will get before buying the car or vehicle. There is a lot of image sliders and animations to make the experience more dynamic and real.
With advice from Uditha Dissanyake, we did realize that the site is going to be used by a lot of people in the age range 45 to 55 years. This meant that the site had to be very easy to use and legible.
Final Thoughts on the web design
The website was similar in a lot of ways to what we had already encountered. Although it was not a novelty project, we were able to squeeze in some features that were challenging to us, and our member Ruchila. We strive to challenge oruselves not only for our clients, but also for our own experience.
You should definitely visit Ritzy Automart if you are searching for a sweet new ride. They have really competitive pricing and a diverse selection of models to fit all kinds of budgets. They also have discounts for permit holders. In the mean time, you can give http://ritzyautomart.com a visit!
Chethane Nanayakkara, owner of Ritzy Automart using the site
There used to be a time when student attendance had to be manually calculated by hand. This was despite the fingerprint machines used to collect the attendances during the start and end of each lecture. The director of Institute of Human Resource Advancement, University of Colombo, Dr Jayakody saw clear room for much needed improvement of this practice.
After getting in touch with one of our co-founders and discussing the problem, a solution was immediately presented. The fingerprint machines were not the most modern models, in that they lacked any form of wireless connectivity. The only way to get at the attendance data was to manually copy the data onto a PC. At this point in time, Dr Jayakody did not want to purchase new fingerprint machines.
This meant that a manual step of copying the data had to be present in the new system. Always up for a challenge, Praveen was already on the case – making it clear that the rest of the system would be highly optimized and perfectly automated that the latter sacrifice would not be felt by the end-user personnel.
Praveen and Hasith representing OrpehusHQ with the IHRA Director (Middle) and IHRA crew utilizing the system
The Solution
The proposed solution was to upload the data onto a backend where all the other processing would happen. The data from the fingerprint machine had the barebones information only: the student ID, date, clock-in time and the clock-out time. The proposed system had to determine every other aspect; from determining if the student was late all the way to determining which subject the student had depending on their course and day of the week. Praveen was hell bent on making the system nothing short of perfect – the algorithms were complicated but efficient. The final outcome was as expected – the fingerprint data had only to be uploaded. Within a minute of uploading, the required reports could be downloaded. The system allowed the retrieval of different types of reports – an overview report for the director and individual reports for the students.
Praveen decided to go a step further – integration with the learning management system. As an added feature of the new system, the students could now view their individual attendance from their LMS.
The new system performed a series of trial runs on a small set of courses. During this trial run, input from the staff helped us to create and produce a practically sound system.
A sound system vs. a practically sound system
It is quite easy to design a system that works perfectly under the optimal conditions. Utilise such a system where a majority of the algorithms depend on the behaviour of people and you’ll quickly see the system crumble like the anecdotal cookie.
The problem lies in the ‘behaviour of people’ – people’s behaviour cannot be modified the same way computer programs do (obviously). We comprehended that rather than adapting the people to the new system, the system should work in a way that requires minimal amount of change on the people’s side.
After this first trial run, the system underwent modification with additional features to address these pain points. This was a major turning point for the team – creating a practical system (in contrast to a MVP) is always the way to go. Such in-depth understanding of the end-user was thanks to the level of communication with the end-user; not just the IT staff but the staff who would actually use it.
Finale
The OrpheusHQ crew unveiled the system after providing the staff with a short training session! Yet another workplace inefficiency corrected accordingly by the Team. The system significantly reduced the time needed to make these reports while providing additional benefits for the management staff and the students.
On the 31st of December 2016, the cool mountaintops of Bandarawela witnessed the duo Kasun Kalhara and Indrachapa Liyanage live in concert. This was one of the first times, that two such high profile artists were brought in for a concert in Bandarawela. The event was undertaken by Youth Aura.
All of the promotional material including the logos, banners, tickets and handouts were produced by us here at OrpheusHQ..
The promotional logo created for the concert showcased on the official t-shirt
We tried something adventurous with the ‘Bandarawela’ text on the tickets; if you look closely, you could see some of the significant places around Bandarawela through the letters.
If you look closely at the letters in “Bandarawela”, you could see some of the famous places like Nine Arches’ BridgeTickets from the concert
The trailer video and the teasers were also made by OrpheusHQ, single-handedly by Hasith.
