Giant Tiger is a national retailer providing discounted products. The company initially approached RealDecoy in 2006 to build its online presence — a new corporate entity as well as a separate site for GT Boutique that would support its fashion flyer.
RealDecoy continues to work with Giant Tiger building its online presence. The popularity of the company’s websites has grown exponentially since our partnership began.
Thank you for building our admin tool. The only downfall is that we aren’t going to be working together as often … because we won’t need you as much as we used to!
Rachelle Mesheau
Advertising Manager
Giant Tiger
Giant Tiger approached RealDecoy to completely redesign its corporate website and implement administration tools to facilitate management of the site.
THE CHALLENGE
Continuous updates
Three sections of the Giant Tiger site were constantly changing: the store locator, events and careers sections. The corporation needed a way to easily and efficiently update these areas.
- Stores: Giant Tiger is heavily involved in the community and has a list of events that they support and charities that they sponsor. They needed a way to house this information and continuously update it.
- Events: The company wanted to present a list of its stores and locations using Google Maps and allow staff to update the listing as the company grows.
- Careers: The careers section of the site needed to address the many different visitors seeking employment at Giant Tiger along with the three categories of opportunities: jobs at stores, jobs at head office and jobs in distribution/transportation. Giant Tiger needed a way to manage job postings on an ongoing basis.
OUR SOLUTION
A focus on usability
RealDecoy created a new look and feel for Giant Tiger’s website and structured the site’s content to offer maximum usability and effectiveness for visitors. The site was built to allow Giant Tiger’s staff to continuously update, add, modify and edit specific content without needing special programming skills.
Building administrative tools
RealDecoy built an administrative tool that allows Giant Tiger staff to access and update the store locator, events and careers sections.
We re-architected the careers section so that it would address all of the different audiences that would be applying for jobs. We built an administration tool to allow Giant Tiger’s human resources staff to add specific jobs to careers categories on the site.
RealDecoy also created a section that listed events and an administration tool to feed events into it so that the marketing department could publish events listings as they come up.
We also built a store locator on the front end with Google Maps. We created another administration tool to allow Giant Tiger to manage and update store hours, add special details about any individual store and add or remove stores as necessary in the store locator section.
Technologies: CMS, Google Maps, PHP
Giant Tiger required a separate online flyer mircosite for GT Boutique, the company’s apparel website.
THE CHALLENGE
The retailer was spending thousands of dollars outsourcing developers on a bi-weekly basis to keep its online flyers current. The constant development of HTML static pages was costly.
Creating an online microsite for flyers
The online flyer microsite would allow Giant Tiger’s client base to see clothing flyers online as soon as a sale begins. First we redesigned and restructured the GT Boutique site. Sale items were organized into their own categories for visitor interaction and visitors were given the ability to sign up for newsletters.
During the second phase of the project we developed a very detailed administration tool that would allow Giant Tiger staff to upload an entirely new flyer to a pre-designed template on a bi-weekly basis.
OUR SOLUTION
A tool to manage the online flyer
RealDecoy developed a new administrative tool to allow Giant Tiger staff to create an online flyer entirely through a custom interface. This tool saved Giant Tiger thousands of dollars by eliminating the need to outsource developers.
Technologies: Flash, PHP
RealDecoy provided a solution that would allow Giant Tiger to run contests on its website.
THE CHALLENGE
Giant Tiger needed a way to drive more traffic to its website and create a viral effect among visitors. The retailer decided to run a contest online and RealDecoy has built at least three contests to date for the company.
A variety of contests
The first contest—‘Refer a Friend’—ran on two separate occasions offering prizes including an iPod and tickets to the World Junior Hockey tournament. The second contest, ‘Read Your Receipt’, allowed customers to enter personal data and the store they visited at a special URL printed on their receipt. ‘Design a T-shirt’ was the third contest; visitors were given the opportunity to upload designs and submit them to Giant Tiger.
OUR SOLUTION
A database and administrative tool for the “Read Your Receipt” contest was built to track the number of entries, allowing visitors to win instantly and be entered into a main draw. The tool also validated each entry (preventing contest fraud) and made sure there were no duplicate uses of the same receipt. Giant Tiger staff can now extract all of this information into an Excel spreadsheet or other data management tool for marketing purposes.
Winning contests
‘Read Your Receipt’ was a particularly successful contest with entries reaching into the hundreds of thousands. The contest allowed Giant Tiger to take in a lot of data from visitors for use by its store owners. The retailer can also use this visitor information in future marketing initiatives.
Overcoming requirements changes
RealDecoy overcame changing requirements associated with these projects and was able to successfully build these contests. We have also built a section of the GT Boutique website that allows visitors to see information about past contest winners and information about upcoming contests at gtboutique.com/contests.
Technologies: PHP, MySQL Database
