Building our Website - Tech Blog 1

In the beginning there was nothing…

Ok, ok, that title isn’t strictly true from a market point of view. There are a few providers out there that can help you with your legal and policy document needs. That said, to us, the experience of other providers wasn’t great. So, after a chat over lunch with John, the concept for Everyday Legal took shape. We wanted a website that would:

• Be easy to use

• Help the customer find and create  what they want

• Be easy to use

• Integrate easily with other services

• Be easy to use

Oh, did I mention, we also wanted the web site to be “easy to use”.

Technically, total automation would be at the heart of our offering. A vision of minimal reliance on back-office processes to deliver on our customers needs. Both John and I have many years experience of corporations that have thrown people at processing shortfalls - Something we were keen to avoid. There is nothing worse than using a web site, thinking you are done, only to read “One of our advisors will be in touch”. When a website describes itself as “self service”, it needs to be a smooth soup to nuts experience for Customer (processing exceptions a rare occurrence). 

So what technologies did we choose? 

The website uses the “ASP Net Core” web site delivery framework (https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/?view=aspnetcore-3.1).

As well as your web browser, this core tech interacts with our own database and other data sources. Talking of other data sources, we have really embraced the “Cloud” with this solution. To make life easy, we wanted to interact with the likes of Google, Facebook, Twitter and Microsoft for things like authentication (log-ons) and (with the customers permission) document storage (upload). We also wanted payment to be familiar and easy to use and so we opted for one of the internet’s leading services for this, Stripe. 

Technology is the easy bit, what about the Business Application? 

Questions like…

“How will the customer create a document?”, “How will the customer file, retrieve, download and possibly print their document?”, “What will the customer experience be?”, “How easy will the ‘Find to Create to Pay to Use’ process be?”  

...are but a few of the myriad of usage cases to consider when designing a web application. 

In future Tech Blogs, we’ll unpack some of those questions and explore how we answered them!

Andrew Gisby

22/2/2020