What they needed

E3 Retail had some good looking products including Point of Sale, Enterprise promotions, Returns, and 4690 hardware migration. Which used Microsoft’s Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF), to provide a visually rich user experience.  However, E3 Retail didn’t  have a comparable website to show them off.

While the marketing team at E3 created the copy for the site, numerous images, and features were added to the design to complement the marketing copy.

What I did

E3 retail wanted to focus on images to convey much of their marketing concepts.  The marketing director created mock-ups in PowerPoint to work through details of the wording, general layout and selection of images with the board of directors.

Once there was agreement on the message and general images for publication, the images were adjusted, tuned, resized, and optimized for web publication.  Both Microsoft Expression Design, Photoshop and other image manipulation tools were used to generate the final results.  In addition to the main images, gradients, buttons, glass look layers and icons were added throughout the site.

Presentation of the images went through several different prototypes of user interaction and looks before finally settling on a flash control that provided the richness and quality presentation of the desired images.

the solution is hosted on IIS7 server on Windows 2008 using ASP.NET and .Net 3.5.

The result

The result was an image intensive web site that quickly conveys the product and service capabilities for E3 Retail and provides the ability for the marketing director to quickly update and add new content and news without requiring a technical development team for every change.

Services Provided

Design

• Prototypes
• Final image generation (sizing, quality adjustments, layout, gradients)
• Photography

Development

• Content management features added (Pretty URLs, Multi Post user control)
• Windows Live Writer support
• Theme design (background, colors, layout)
• Flash customization
• XHTML / CSS / Javascript
• Jquery support added for tabs, menus
• Browser CSS design and testing: IE8, IE7, Safari, IE6
• Deployment and configuration of IIS7 and Windows Server 2008

Features

• Rotating image banners on all product pages
• Pretty URLs
• Content management
• Windows Live Writer Support (edit or create pages / posts)
• Web WYSIWIG editor
• IIS7 Hosting on Windows Server 2008 platform
• Multi Post user control
• Modular page components can be used on other pages
• JQuery 1.2.6 support
• JQuery UI 1.5.3 support (tabs)
• JQuery dropdown menus (superfish)
• Search and Opensearch support
• RSS Syndication feeds
• Browser support: IE 8, IE7, Firefox 3, Safari (limited IE6 support)
• Ratings
• Bookmarks: favorites, e-mail, digg, dzone, stumbleupon, reddit, del.ico.us, newvine, furl, blinklist