Combat South (December 2002 - February 2003)

http://newmedia2.newscentre.co.uk/combat_south_store

Description

This site was built for a local airsoft skirmish company who wanted to be able to sell BB guns and associated equipment over the net. Actually, this was quite a pioneering web site to do, as at the time there weren't any other shops like this online in the UK.

Tools

Coldfusion
Dreamweaver MX
Coldfusion Studio
SQL Server
Imagemagick
Fireworks

Technical

I designed and built the shop to be easy to 'lift out' and drop into other sites. This was the first custom built shop for JPSEP and it made sense to be able to use it as the basis for the other e-commerce sites that were starting to be developed. The administration system is extremely easy to use. I devised a 'map' based system allowing the user to add and edit products and categorys in the shop - basically, they see a representation onscreen of how the shop is actually laid out. This design makes it easy and intuitive to navigate (indeed, it only took 4 hours to set the shop up form scratch - setting up the categories and adding 100 products with images). Full automatic image resizing is carried out - the system generates both thumbnails and full size images for the site from a single upload. File management is carried out as well - unused images are deleted to save space automatically. The shopping cart system uses a session array to store chosen products. A running total is generated on the fly and displayed to the user on every screen of the site, which makes shopping online a lot easier! A search facility provides the user with the ability to locate products they are interested in without having to browse each category. The search is word based and quite fuzzy, giving the user some control over how many results are returned.