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Recently Completed: Heathers-store.com
Project: Product catalog, shopping cart, Web services integration
Heathers-store.com owner Heather Gunsch was looking for a way to get out from under the high monthly fee she was paying to a large Web store hosting company. With a background in graphic design, so she didn't want to give up design control of her Web site, but she needed someone with technical expertise to help her transition her site to a lower-cost place.
ActivePage Design proposed a solution by which Heather would be able to update the look and feel of her site using Microsoft FrontPage, and ActivePage Design would build the automated processes that would make the product catalog and shopping cart work. So, when you look at a product at Heathers-store.com, the layout and design of the page is maintained by Heather, but the content of the page is dynamically generated from her product database.
ActivePage Design also created several Web services connections for Heathers-store.com to make the site easy to use. The shopping cart calculates shipping costs by connecting to Web services interfaces from the United States Postal Service and UPS, so customers can know their shipping costs before they check out. Check-out functions are connected to PayPal. Finally, when Heather updates her product catalog, a one-click process updates her data feed to Google's Froogle product search service.
Heather's product catalog database is innovative. Instead of using a slow and cumbersome Web browser interface to type in all of her product information, Heather has a custom-made Microsoft Access interface on her computer. The Access interface connects to the database server on her Web site so that her edits take immediate effect.
Heather's monthly Web hosting fee has been cut by 65 percent by switching to ActivePage Design, allowing her to recoup the project costs in 18 months. But, she wasn't counting on the extra boost that ActivePage Design's services would give to her sales; two weeks after her new site went live, Heather wrote, "This is so exciting—our sales are higher than ever for this time of the year. Usually it's like we've closed for the season during the summer but that's not the case now." It looks like payback will come faster than expected!
"It was nice to have a web designer that actually listened and didn't get frustrated," Heather concluded. "I've had several compliments on ease of use! You've made the project easy and have given me everything I've asked for and some I didn't even know I wanted."
To visit the Heathers-store.com Web site,
go to www.heathers-store.com. To contact
owner Heather Gunsch regarding this project, send e-mail to
heather@heathers-store.com.
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