The Country Cottage Gift Shoppe
Client: Co-ower of country cottage gift shoppe
Deadlines: 2008
Project Description:
In October of 2007, I was commissioned to build and design a website from scratch for a client who had a partnership in a small business. This site would list various product information, contact information, and news related items. Her basic goal was to get the products visible on the internet and not focus so much on the online ordering and shopping cart mechanisms.
Project Solution:
I accepted this project under a contract of a set hourly rate. Her deadline was flexible so I was able to do this on the weekends. Through email contact, I was able to develop a design that she was happy with. The design was meant to be dreamy and she wanted to utilize pastel colors. In the design process I felt blue worked the best, for the design and frame of the site, because it was the darkest of the color choices. I decided to code her site in PHP which would allow for the use of include files. This also fit into her budget since most web hosting companies will charge more for Microsoft servers in order to use ASP. I kept the design simple having a series of tabs across the top of the pages for easy access to the three main areas and utilizing the right side of the page for the submenu and featured items sections.
Some of the important decisions I made with the site architecture and design were to have 20 items per page in the products section and also organize the products into various categories. I felt that more than 20 thumbnail items per page would either be too crowded or require the viewer to scroll down to far. I utilized various links at the bottom of the pages which would indicate what items are being shown. For example “Page 1 Showing items [1-20]” would be present and there would be a link to the next section. This design was intuitive and mimicked the method that most search engines display their results. Each product thumbnail would open into another window, containing a more descriptive version of the product, as well as an enlarged image.
There were thousands of products to post on the site. The CD of source images organized the products into 24 various categories. This would have made the sub navigation cumbersome at this amount so I had a discussion with the client. We can up with a decision to group the categories into a smaller number, placing some categories together. This solved the issue and we were able to cut the submenu down to eight items instead of the initial 24.
Once the design was completed, coding the site was the next step. This went off without too much trouble and I was able to test out the developing site in a section of my own personal web space. This allowed for me to test out the CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) across all available browsers for compatibility as well as give the client the option to view the work in progress and offer valuable critique.
Once the site was coded, I worked with her to find a web hosting company and web space where the site would live. I was able to walk her through the registration process over the phone. Within a half an hour, she had a domain name registered and server space to place the site. I made the site live and offered ongoing web support. She was happy with the design and finished product.
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