pedalr
Four guys on a journey, Andrew, James, Joe and Gene wanted to share the enthusiasm they had for bicycles. Described as a better marketplace for people who love bikes, pedalr is the team’s bid at creating an online environment where bike fans can gather, talk, and most importantly, buy and sell quality gear. While online commerce is by no means a new phenomenon, the pedalr team wanted to create an environment that was more than just a shop front. They wanted their site to be a community, and for that they needed a stable, beautiful foundation.
Built on the solid simplicity of Ruby on Rails and beautiful interface design, pedalr is a marketplace that makes shopping a breeze. With a clear navigation structure and well thought out page layouts, users can browse, find what they want and buy it – an end to end workflow that has been optimised over and over again. With constant feedback from the pedalr team, Vesess took a blank sheet of Internet paper and from wireframes to markup made a site that is an absolute pleasure to use.
pedalr Admin Wireframe
Product View Wireframe
Now, let’s dive under the hood a little. A number of neat little tricks were used to make sure the pedalr team got the functionality they wanted. Firstly, Xapian, an Open Source search engine library was used for search indexing. Once integrated into Rails, Xapian made search indexing on pedalr that much more effective.
Of course, where would a community store be without social networking these days? Pedalr supports Twitter integration so buyers and sellers can use the micro blogging service to their advantage on site. The backbone of pedalr is its community, and the fully integrated on site forum is one of the site’s most appealing features.
While posting pictures of products has traditionally been a time consuming process, the Vesess team set out to remedy that for pedalr. Thanks to the wonders of Javascript, pedalr users can now edit the photos they upload on the fly.
Once past the design and development phase, Vesess plugged in the Google Checkout and Paypal payment gateways and let Andrew and his friends take the site out for a spin. Pedalr is now public and performing as expected. The team is thrilled with how the site performs and their new community is thriving.
Moving quickly from concept to final product, pedalr was one of the most ambitious web application projects Vesess has attempted. We had a lot of fun working with Andrew and Co. and look forward to collaborating with them again in the future!
Home Page
Product View Page
Checkout Page View
My Pedalr Account Settings View
Image Cropping View
