Winn Cards and Comics

The Winn Site is a project I have been working on for a couple of months now. The guys wanted a brand new site- the one they had was, umm, bad. They also wanted an online catalog that they could update, along with the ability to update tournament dates. With that in mind, I got started.

The design I gave them was a pretty basic XHTML/CSS layout. The logo was one that they supplied, so I went with that color scheme. I used divs to organize the soon-to-be large amount of information in an aesthetically pleasing way. The challege with the design of this site was that they could add as many products they wanted whereever they wanted, and the design had to be able to handle it. The great part about the site, however, is the programming aspect of it. I created a number of functions to print the catalog info, as well as add, edit and delete to/from the site. The back end I wrote is totally custom, password protected, and designed to be pretty ‘liquid,’ meaning easy to update and manage. They have the ability to add products, including uploading a picture [how to on that in a later post], add tournaments, with custom date and time functions, and add categories which automatically become part of the navigation. They can also edit anything, and delete anything. The product page is the best page on the site, using flow control to change what exactly is displayed on the site. The user can also sort any information on the product pages and there is a search function, making finding any product very easy to do.

All in all it was a good experience, and I learned a lot. I did have experience in coding CMSs before this, such as on my own sites, but this was my first real updatable online catalog. In the near future they hope to add a shopping cart, which it looks like I will also be doing for them. Later!