How to optimize the landscape design platform operations

Having a neat and beautiful landscape is becoming a trend nowadays, especially with long-running Covid variants around. Experts around the globe can help to arrange everything depending on the clients’ needs. To facilitate the design of the outdoor space, homeowners, as well as business owners, usually seek professional assistance.

Today, many tools can help you create your dream space. But what if we tell you that there is a greater solution using which you get both professional help and direct delivery to your home. We are describing what steps were made to improve the connection between our client’s platform and their partners’ database, automate the majority of the business processes and create a better user experience for their customers.

Project Background and Main Tasks

Our client cooperates with a leading garden center to help create the best landscape designs. Since the majority of customer requests were handled manually by the client’s team members, they were looking for a solution that will automate the plant selection process. Most people consider changes in their landscapes during wintertime, and the service aims at assisting in planning them in advance and preordering all the necessary items.

They utilize a wide range of parameters in order to help their customers pick the most suitable pieces depending on the climate zones, seasons, color schemes as well as various traits that would help plants survive in areas where animals can potentially harm or destroy these plants.

The main goal was to find a software development team to help them optimize the existing platform and automate all the processes. The Agiliway team was expected to improve the solution and simplify the decision-making process for their customers through advanced yet easy-to-use filtering.

The business logic behind the solution is advanced, therefore, it required thorough analysis to optimize the overall functionality of the platform.

The key requirements were to

• optimize the website operating capacity
• establish a well-structured and user-friendly filtering system
• add analytics solution to help track user’s behavior on the platform
• create a PDF to download with the mockup of selected items from the platform

So, the solution shall be a combination of a web platform with advanced functionality to not only buy plants but also help to design future installments. This way customers will be able to see the final result as well as receive recommendations on how to take care of the chosen items.

Solutions

The client requested filtering depending on the size of plants, their color, suitable seasons, and climate zones as well as other traits crucial for growing a healthy plant. This includes a 3D preview (within paid subscription), where a customer can see what the final result will look like depending on the size of their backyard. In addition, website users get advice on how to prepare, layout, and plant as well as take care of the trees or flowers they order in terms of soil, fertilizers, etc.

To implement all the requested solutions

• Node.js was chosen for the backend and the frontend is built with React
• Next.js framework is utilized owing to it being great for generating static web content, namely for depicting the main logic of the website in the browser. Due to having a large social media following that leads customers to the website, it was crucial to ensure that the load on the server will be reduced. Next.js allows doing that by storing all these static data for visual content in S3 bucket. Therefore, our client saves hosting costs and gets improved functionality.
• PDF generation performed through pdf-creator-node

The Agiliway engineers also worked on creating algorithms that allow building the color mapping, prioritizing them, and sorting them to match color schemes. Our team received an Excel file with color pairs, and every time our client consulted their customers they had to go through that file to find the best matches. The major solution for this part was creating a color map, which greatly optimized the performance and allows saving a ton of time for both parties. Since our client’s platform is connecting to their partner’s website through API, some color schemes were disrupted and they didn’t match in both places. We helped automate this process, fixed the existing errors, and made the algorithm function properly.

Another distinctive feature is the automatic process of defining the growing features of a plant depending on a plant’s preferred climate zone or how animals or insects are attracted to a specific type of plant. The platform users benefit greatly from the given feature as it allows them to get the most suitable trees, bushes, or flowers for their gardens depending on how the weather and climate conditions match the area of planting.

From a technical point of view, our team implemented the application through three major components: backend, frontend, and tent-admin panel. They are located in three different containers hosted on Amazon Elastic Container Service and S3 bucket for statics. Moreover, the team set up the load balance within ECS that successfully prevents any system failure during mail sending to over 10 million subscribers of the platform.

Summary

To improve and optimize the operating capacity of our client’s platform, the Agiliway software development team used React, Node.js and Next.js. Located in different containers using ECS, they help to stabilize the platform’s operations and establish the load balance our client needed so much due to having millions of subscribers visiting the platform from social media accounts.

In addition, our team managed to create user-friendly filtering that simplifies the selection process as well as reduces the time for both website owners and users.

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