Print Network

www.printnetwork.com

Aside from my own site, printnetwork.com was the first site that I created, from scratch, almost entirely by myself. The first task, of course, was the site architecture. Knowing that the site was to serve a dual purpose, as a marketing tool as well as a business-facilitation tool, I split the site neatly into two major sections. The first, "Company Information", is for potential customers to learn about Print Network. As a promotion piece, it was designed with a little more concern for design aesthetics than was the second section, "Client Services". The client services section was designed to facilitate business transactions between Print Network and its customers. As such, the graphics were created in a manner that they worked well with the graphics of the company information section, but were less intrusive and downloaded more quickly.
(PNI homepage screen shot).
(Client services homepage screen shot).

Probably the largest area the company information section was the "Sample Gallery" section, Print Network's online portfolio. This section featured about thirty different pieces that they had printed. I designed the layout of this section to prominantly show the scanned photo of the pieces themselves, while also offering room to display information about the piece. Users can either linearly view the entire portfolio or skip around between major sections.

("Sample Gallery" homepage screen shot).
(Screen shot of online portfolio page).

The client services section contains a number of online forms, linking to CGI scripts I wrote in PERL, that customers can use to facilitate business transactions. For example, using the online "Request for Quote" form, customers can enter and submit the necessary information for receiving an estimate for a job from Print Network--a process that up until then needed to be done tediously by hand. The "Request for Schedule" form serves a similar function. Some of these forms are broken into multiple pages, with the content of subsequent pages being affected by the user's reponses in the preceeding page. Hidden fields were used to help maintain persistency so that a user could use the form repeatedly without having to re-enter a majority of the information each time. I developed some JavaScript applications to check for user requests for unreasonable project timeframes. I also created JavaScript combo-boxes to allow a user to enter her own data into pull-down menus.
("Request for Quote" screen shot).

To help faciliate file transfer, I also developed an upload/download section for client use. Each of Print Network's 30-or-so major clients were given a username and password. Using basic authentication, I created a password-protected directory on the http server for each of these clients. I then trained Print Network's staff to upload files into these directories so that their clients could download them. Since printnetwork.com was hosted at an ISP, and anonymous FTP was the only FTP method allowed, I created individual FTP directories for each of the clients. I then created an entry page which presented users with a form and asked them to enter their username. A backend PERL/CGI script would then take users to their appropriate directories. As an added security measure, the directories are blind; their contents are not visible.

printnetwork.com was served from a FreeBSD UNIX system running Apache.

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