Project Profile: PLGH Advisors Relaunches AntiquesByPrestige.com January 2017

PLGH Advisors is hitting the ground running for 2017 by relaunching AntiquesByPrestige.com - an online web application used as both a customer facing web site and an employee servicing tool for processing and managing customer invoices. AntiquesByPrestige.com was redesigned using the latest cutting edge web technologies from both Microsoft and open sources vendors.

AntiquesByPrestige.com showcases the work of Prestige Refinishing Shop of Houston, Texas. Prestige Refinishing Shop is a forty year-old plus small business that specializes in furniture refinishing, upholstery, construction, reproduction and restoration. Antiques By Prestige was initially launch in 2008 using ASP.NET and Window’s Web forms. At that time HTML5 was not an official web standard, and responsive design was not very common especially in the Microsoft ecosystem.

The customer facing portion of the web application utilizes Bootstrap, a device friendly front-end web framework, that provides a responsive design experience regardless if you are browsing with a desktop computer, phone or tablet. The employee invoice servicing tool incorporates Knockout JS on top of JQuery & traditional JavaScript to provide an intuitive user interface where employees can easily generate customer invoices with minimal effort and very few mistakes. Both pieces of this application share the same backend for data access utilizing MVC & Entity Framework.

Some other challenges that were address was updating outdated technologies. Currently Antiques By Prestige has three videos on its web site. Originally these videos were rendered and displayed to web clients via Adobe Flash plugin. At the time to strike a perfect balance between good video quality and fast download speed web site developers had choose either to stream their videos using YouTube which contains advertising or bundle them using a Codec (Compression/Decompression software) and have the client download directly from web site. Each one has its own strengths and weaknesses. PLGH Advisors evaluated three options for hosting videos online: Azure Media Services, Office 365 Video & YouTube. Azure Media Services offers best options for streaming and hosting videos but was too expensive. Office 365 Video offered great quality at an affordable price but is not intended for displaying videos outside the corporate domain. PLGH Advisor decided to re-render all videos at the highest resolution available and host them on YouTube and eliminating the need having to rely on Adobe Flash.

PLGH Advisors is planning a few more major upgrades for Antiques By Prestige in 2017 as well. Fourth quarter 2017 Antiques By Prestige will be full service e-commerce web site offering our customers the capability to buy furniture or collectables from our web site directly and to let customers sell their own items on consignment as well.