Sites We've Made
Van Needs quote system
Web application architecture and implementation
Website: van.insurance.co.uk /
van.lloydstsbcompare.com
Client: First Central: Van Needs
Developed by Denny, while employed by Digital Craftsmen.
The Van Needs quote system is a good example of white-labelling (where one web application can supply a service to several different brands, each with their own look and feel). The system provides a motor insurance quote application and response service for a number of separate website brands - including Insurance.co.uk and Lloyds TSB's 'For The Journey'. The current system will support any number of brands with a similar quote process.
Although these sites all deal with commercial vehicles, one of the goals when building the system was to ensure that it would also be easy to extend to cover other market sectors at a future date - e.g. motorcycle insurance. The end result was an extremely flexible and extensible quote processing engine capable of handling any number and combination of front-end brands and back-end quote providers (insurance brokers and aggregators).
I was responsible for all the back-end development of this system, for example the database handling, the XML API calls to the quote aggregators, and processing the received quotes. My colleague implemented most of the front-end features such as the form-handling and the site themes. We collaborated on the project design phase and then throughout the project to ensure that all of these parts of the system would work together without any problems.
