 refers to their services as “Full-funnel Marketing & Sales Automation + CRM”, which essentially means a CRM that contains a marketing component. In more ways than one, SharpSpring is similar to the 

 platform — and offers standard CRM functions such as leads and forms, but they also have components like shopping cart abandonment and email marketing automation based on triggers.

Integrating SharpSpring into a website is actually fairly simple with the 

, which offers many methods/endpoints with a standard REST API. Since VIA is primarily a PHP and JS-based agency, there is a handy third-party 

 available that we use. However, for the purposes of this blog article, we are going to look at the API itself and the following example:

A web application that needs to send user data to SharpSpring as a lead and then place the lead into a custom list.

To create leads, SharpSpring offers the "createLeads" method, which can take up to 500 objects (though only 250 are recommended at once). A lead is only required to have an "emailAddress" (

When creating leads, if a lead already exists, the API will return object-level errors, which won't prevent the entire creation from failing.

So for our example, our application would send our user data to SharpSpring using the "createLeads" method and passing objects that contain "emailAddress", "firstName", and "lastName".

Once the request is returned, we will add them to our list.

Similar to the lead methods, list has the "addListMembers" and "addListMembersEmailAddress" methods.

Our team prefers using the "addListMemberEmailAddress" method since users only have to pass the email address versus the lead ID, which is a little easier to manage without keeping track of it. 

Adding a lead to a list is that easy, only requiring the lead email address and the list ID."

To note, this call is limited to 500 leads (there is no note on staying near 250 like the createLeads method).

Putting this all together in an example class, I have two methods, "createLeads" and "addLeadsToList". Both methods take an array of lead items, while "addLeadsToList" also takes the list ID.

As seen here, even without a library, the SharpSpring API is simple and straightforward to use.

As an added bonus, at the end of the script, we can output all the members from our list by using the "getListMembers" method. With this method, one just needs to pass the list ID.

Now you can create leads, add them to a list, and then output all the leads that belong to said list.

If you are looking for CRM integrations like SharpSpring or HubSpot into existing web platforms, our 

Backend Development

PHP, Javascript & React

Interactions with SharpSpring

When planning the KPA ticketing app, the first big decision was deciding which technology stack to use

Given the complex and highly-interactive design, we needed something that was going to be developer-friendly while letting us build an application that was highly responsive to user interactions. Nothing’s more frustrating than a slow user interface!

VIA has mostly standardized on ReactJS for smaller interactive user experiences as well as single-page web applications so it seemed like a great fit, even though the ticketing app is just a small (but critical!) piece of a much larger site.

The other advantage to developing the ticketing portion of the site as an almost stand-alone app is that development on the rest of the site could continue in parallel. The more simultaneous work happening, the better!

React’s power comes from the way everything is divided into components which are displayed on a page. Once a component is identified, it becomes trivial to use it in multiple places on a page without having to write a bunch of extra code.

For example, we created a component for a single seat in the list of all available seats. This was great because seats that had been added to the user’s cart had a very similar design, albeit with slightly different data. This component-based architecture let us have all the shared code for that seat layout in a single place, even though it was displayed in multiple locations.

An additional benefit of using components is it makes it easier to allow multiple developers to work on the project at the same time.

The ticketing app was, understandably, quite data heavy. We need to store lists of available seats, seat map data, pricing information, promo codes, shopping cart data, venue information, etc. This data was constantly being updated as people selected seats or filtered based on pricing points or seating sections.

Luckily, this is another use-case where React shines. Leveraging an additional tool called, Redux, we can easily store all of the data used by the site in a single data store. Then we can set up our different components to pull data from that store. When data in the store changes, the components using that data automatically update themselves. All of this changing and updating is blindly fast because React is very good at only updating the components that have actually changed. No need to refresh the entire page!

For example, let’s say the user wants to filter seats to a certain price range. We can build a component which lets them select the prices they want. Those selected prices are fed back into the data store. Then React takes care of updating all of the components that depend on that data. This includes things like updating the seat map and ticket list to hide seats that don’t match the selected filter.Tools aren’t a guarantee of success. Just like a fancy hammer doesn’t mean you can easily build a house. The most important part of a project is the people working on it. Given the huge scope of this project and the aggressive timeline, our expert people using the above tools allowed us to deliver a quality product while sticking to the timeline we set out for ourselves.

Want to know more about our work for Kentucky Performing Arts? Read our case studies on 

the new Kentucky Performing Arts branding

how we translated that branding into the new kentuckyperformingarts.org website

Ecommerce

Websites

Using React and Redux to build the Kentucky Performing Arts ticketing experience

Web Design

Custom Dev

Illustration

Frontend Development

UX / UI

Celestial Bodies of the Past Present & Future

Branding

Non-profit Marketing

Graphic Design

Art Direction

Louisville Institute

While we have wide and varied development expertise and experience the core of our development skill is with PHP, Javascript, Vue and React, allowing us to maintain and develop new features for 80% of all websites on the Internet. That said, we regularly explore new and useful platforms to stay ahead of the ever-changing development curve.

PHP, Javascript & React

PHP, Javascript & React: Case Studies

01

Celestial Bodies of the Past Present & Future

02

Louisville Institute

PHP, Javascript & React: Blog Posts

Interactions with SharpSpring

Using React and Redux to build the Kentucky Performing Arts ticketing experience