| Steve Wille Photography |
| Photography eCommerce Website |
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"Without Iron Speed Designer, this would have taken over a solid week’s work...
Instead, I only had to design the database schema, and a few clicks later, we had a
working web application." - Mike Willie
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Photography eCommerce Website |
Steve Willie Photography
Centennial, CO USA
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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 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 1-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.
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Application Size and Scope |
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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 so far, and as the events photographed
accumulate, so will the gallery size. The application has 7 pages visible to customers and there are 2
administrative pages.
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The Project |
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The project only took about 10 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.
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Code Extensions and Customizations |
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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.
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Page Layout Customizations |
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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.
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Metrics for Success |
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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.
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Iron Speed Designer Impact |
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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.
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Next Steps |
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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.
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View the Application |
Visit www.stevewille.com.
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About the Developer |
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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.
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