Behind-the-scenes of new "The Cheesecake Factory" website

We have recently launched an innovative website for The Cheesecake Factory using IBM Web Content Management. It was a successful project that only a few days following launch, the client received a surprising number of positive response from visitors.

We have recently launched an innovative website for The Cheesecake Factory using IBM Web Content Management. It was a successful project that only a few days following launch, the client received a surprising number of positive response from visitors.

The web site redefines the boundary of user experience that web technology is capable of delivering. Our collaborator Automatic Partners has published a sensational article that details the dynamics of the restaurant experience we attempt to convey.

The Cheesecake Factory specifically requested the site to go live before National Cheesecake Day which left us only few weeks for development. That was a intimidating and challenging deadline to meet,  for a website that was designed to be fanatical in every aspect of the user experience. There were a number of technical unknowns here and there – such as achieving maximized SEO indexing for in-Flash navigation, tuning the video to fit user with any connection speed without compromising quality , feeding WCM data to Flash, and more. On top of that, there were also an overwhelming number of contents to be created – just the menu section alone contains 200 items.

Just like solving any complex problem, investment in careful planning really helps out no matter how pressing the deadline seems. In terms of WCM development, instead of jumping right into development just like any developers would do, we exhaustively went thru all the pages down to the micro level to seek opportunities to componentize and generate reusable templates. Also, we dodge another common development pitfall that developers tend to ignore the authoring templates field requirement detail. Since we know once the template is handed off to content authors, they will work around the clock to proliferate a larger amount of contents and human mistake is inevitable. Setting field requirement really help minimize that and thus mitigate turnaround time.