Premier Vet Alliance
Premier Vet Alliance provides a Premier Pet Care Plan to veterinary practices. Premier Pet Care Plan is a leading pet wellness plan that makes it easier for vets to deliver the best possible care. Their objective was to open a new registration channel and help veterinary practices improve marketing around premier pet care plan. The idea was that signing up a new client could happen on a tablet in a vet clinic and on the internet through a vet’s website.
The Brief
Premier Vet Alliance approached us to develop an interface to allow veterinary practice clients to register and set up their monthly payments by direct debit. There were lots of different elements to consider such as data storage, payment gateways, and clinic customisation. Through discussions and a discovery session it was decided that the physical data would be stored and managed on their own system. The portal interface would be managed separately, with administration at a global and practice level. Each practice would have their own installation of the portal on a unique subdomain and be customisable within a fixed template.
The Solution
Our solution was to build a WordPress multi-site. WordPress is the world’s most popular open source content management system (CMS). It’s user friendly, adaptable and free to use. The multi-site feature allows a network of sites to be set up, each on their own subdomain, with just one installation of WordPress. The benefit of this is that it keeps server requirements relatively low, and centralises management of the sites. For example, if you want to make a change to the template or add functionality, you can do it just once in the ‘master’ installation, and all sites in the network will automatically be updated.
Using the existing API, we created a user-friendly front end that communicates with the current system, validates the data entered and provides confirmation to the user.
We developed with the future in mind and ensured that the portal could be efficiently extended to accommodate future needs. For example, it could be developed further to allow additional end client self-service for changes and additions, or to enable veterinary practice self-service for portal customization.
Project Lead
Zoey O’Neill
Managing Director
This project was great to work on. At times it was technically challenging and it gave us valuable experience working with APIs. There were lots of specifics that we had to get right as this portal was going to be used by a large number of users at veterinary clinics all over the UK. Each clinic had to be able to easily re-skin the portal on the front-end with their brand colours and logo and each instance of the portal was created on a sub-domain. We were really pleased with the solution and so was the client.