Over the last few years, the landscape for our business has been heavily changed by the outbreak of COVID-19. Jambour Digital has had to adapt quite a bit to both continue to grow and to retain existing clients. We've supported our existing clients by offering them both financial support and extra features. But as we move back to something a bit like normality, how do we plan to expand Jambour Digital?
Challenges faced
Over the last year or so, we've faced a tremendous amount of challenges within the business, ranging from not being able to see new clients, to not being able to meet with our existing clients. All of this makes development much trickier. Further to this, we've encountered that a lot of our clients themselves are so busy that things like updating a website or even simply checking out a new feature on a website is becoming a difficult task to fit into their schedules.
Leading us back to normal
As the leading managing director of Jambour Digital, I have overseen all plans to support the business out of this difficult time and to support our clients in doing so.
We have adopted a new member of the company on contract, Kyle, who works with us when we need him. This will help me focus on the business side of the company alongside my brother and my mother who are the other managing directors of the company.
We plan to take things one step at a time to minimise risk and to ensure a safe return to normal.
We understand our clients who hopefully understand that the most important thing here is safety.
EventPanel, a Jambour Digital product was a project that I had the joy of developing two and a half years ago. It was not an easy task but was incredibly rewarding to finish.
Its origins go back to one of Jambour's first clients who required an event management system within their website. As a result, the system was tailored to the client's requirements. It was tightly integrated into the Sahara ecosystem which all websites are. It's development focused on simplicity rather than flexibility and as a result, the finished product met the original requirements to a T. But it was very static. New features were added and they were easy to add, but they were often niche features that were specific to one client.
In 2020 we at Jambour launched a separate product designed to replace a considerable chunk of the original websites code base. The product was called EventPanel and whilst it appeared the same as the original website, the underlying implementation was somewhat different. The new implementation was designed to make modularity the key focus of the design so that new websites could be developed faster than ever. Version 1 definitely did this to the degree that it could be used across multiple websites. But it still had a solid static feel to it and not a dynamic feeling to it.
Version 2 aims to improve this by building upon the foundations that version 1 set out. Version 2 gets rid of any ties to specific designs and reduces any club membership event to one of four kinds:
- A free event in which users can sign up to
- A free event in which users can sign up to and a superuser can pick who attends the event
- A paid event in which users can add to their basket before paying
- A paid event in which users can select a partner and pay to sign up to, or leave the partner field blank and allow another user to add them as a partner
These were outlined as functional requirements of the original client's specification that have slowly made it into the new specification for EventPanel. As such, we've also modularised the databases so that they aren't tied to one club.
Jambour Digital plans to make a live testable version of EventPanel available soon too.
