Contrast Graphic Supplies - A case study.
Contrast Graphic Supplies though being a well established business had never had a web presence. They approached the nakedWeb team with an open mind regarding marketing the business online. After discussions to ascertain what the company hoped to achieve from having a website, we were able to mould a 2 year plan for the site.
The first phase was to redesign
the entire company branding to bring it more up to date with today's design practices. The site was designed initially as an online brochure
and contact point, allowing for the future development of a client login and order tracking facility. As all our systems are bespoke and built
open ended, it was easy to allow for the future development of an online shopping cart.
Like most businesses, the product range
supplied by contrast is ever changing and it was necessary to build a structure which allows for numerous categories to contain few or
many products. Product images are an important part of any company brochure and on the web we generally face trade-offs between image size
and quality versus download times. In this case nakedWeb, using a technology called AJAX, came up with a handy space saving method of
displaying thumbnail images which when rolled over with the mouse, display larger more detailed images without affecting page download times.
This first foray into the world wide web has already brought this Cambridgeshire based company sales enquiries from as far and wide as France and Scotland.
Technologies employed
- ASP (VBScript) - for server side data management.
- SQL - for database interaction.
- JavaScript - for client side interaction and speed.
- AJAX - for high quality image display without affecting download time.
- HTML 4.01 - for site structure.
- CSS - for site layout and design.
