Photography eCommerce Website

Steve Wille Photography
Centennial, CO USA

My dad is a wedding photographer and likes to publish pictures to the web the day after a wedding. A site he had been using went out of business, and he suddenly needed a new way to let family and friends view and order pictures online. I knew that Iron Speed Designer would provide a better interface than anything I could come up with without using an expensive graphic designer. The finished product looks great and is easy for one-visit customers to get through a large collection of pictures and order their favorites.

The site is a combination of a photo gallery and a shopping cart. While there are existing tools that could accomplish the same thing, we wanted to build our own site that worked the way we wanted.

Application size and scope

This eCommerce application uses only one database. And I admit it is probably the simplest I have ever used. At this writing, there are several thousand pictures, but as the events photographed accumulate, the gallery size will increase. The application has seven pages visible to customers and there are two administrative pages.

The project

The project only took about ten hours, spread over a few days. The team was just me. Iron Speed Designer created almost all of the necessary pages the first time I ran the Application Wizard. Then, the only time-consuming part was rearranging the layout of the various elements on each page.

Code extensions and customizations

Code customization only took a few minutes. I only had to write a few lines of code to store a value from a grand total in the data grid. I also had to modify the default number of items per page when viewing a grid. Both were extremely easy to do.

Page layout customizations

I used a template theme, then opened the images in Photoshop and turned the blues into grays, just so that the pictures would be up against a neutral background. But all table elements were left in their original form.

Metrics for success

This site was built just to be able to say that the pictures from a wedding will be available for purchase online. The measure of success was seen when an order came in a day after the site went live from an extended family member who couldn't make it to a wedding.

Iron Speed Designer impact

Without Iron Speed Designer, this would have taken over a solid week's work, just to create the basic functionality. Creating a web-based interface would have doubled that time. Instead, I only had to design the database schema, and a few clicks later, we had a working web application.

Next steps

Now that numerous people have seen the site, version 2 will have some changes, but nothing that can't be done within the Iron Speed Designer environment.

View the application

Visit www.stevewille.com.

About the developer

Mike Wille has a B.S. in Business, Computer Information Systems from Colorado State University. After graduation, he moved to St. Louis to build computer applications for a multimedia production company. He is now working independently, and once again calls Colorado home.