ALD Automotive

Southpoint won their first contract in 2015 to provide web development expertise to this leading European vehicle leasing operation.

Industry: Auto Financing

Role: Contract Web Developer

ALD Automotive is the leading vehicle leasing operation in Europe managing over 1.51 million vehicles across 43 countries worldwide. They are owned by the French bank Société Générale.

In 2015 Southpoint Solutions won their first contract to become the service provider and SME (subject matter expert) for their public facing websites. The parent company had recently delivered a new branding for all of their European websites and the UK company needed to follow suit and create a new website that adhered to the corporate branding guidelines.

The European websites were created using a custom template that required the Microsoft .NET ASP platform with an SQL Server backend. The UK company was operating differently to their European counterparts in the sense that the current CTO had already invested and embraced Microsoft SharePoint Server as an organization wide platform for collaboration and business information applications.

Work had already begun on a website to display telematics data to fleet and vehicle owners using the SharePoint platform. As this was the case they decided to continue with SharePoint for the public facing website.

In conjunction with the marketing manager, work began on creating the website in SharePoint using the brand guidelines that were provided from the Paris HQ. In addition, the marketing manager also wanted his UK website to be fully responsive and to work on all device formats and resolutions. As this was something that the existing template did not do very well, the UK site would offer a more advanced user experience and subsequently customer reach. To achieve the required responsiveness Southpoint recommended that the Twitter Bootstrap 3 framework should be used to control the display of the site using a single CSS source.

Analysis and Design

Southpoint began work to analyse the branding guidelines to create mock-ups for the homepage, following section landing pages and content pages. Information architecture workshops were also arranged to design the UX and UI components for the site. The end process was a detailed design document to supplement a project plan.

Original mock-up designed by Southpoint

The site was delivered successfully on-time and within the agreed initial six months contract duration. The website structure is still working today, albeit with a new coat of paint, which is a testament to the design and development provided by Southpoint.

Core Skills

  • SharePoint Server 2013 Enterprise including Administration
  • jQuery / AJAX
  • SharePoint Rest API
  • Bootstrap 3
  • HTML / CSS / JavaScript
  • Information Architecture
  • Graphic Design