Style Guide

Our client, a UK based company, wanted to provide designers with an online platform to showcase their collections thereby enabling them to reach out to a larger audience base. They also required an advertisement management module that would enable them to control the display of advertisements on the website. Based on their requirements Open Source Development developed the style guide website – a comprehensive resource on style. The solution enabled the client to track website users thereby enabling them to generate extensive and detailed market research reports.

Customer Profile
Our client is a UK based company.

Business Requirements
Our client required an automated solution which would serve as an online style guide for their customers. The solution was intended to generate revenues through on-site advertising and therefore, provisions had to be made to ensure that site administrators could manage the display of appropriate advertisements, through a corresponding back-end interface. Extensive user tracking functionalities were required to be built into the solution to interpret customer trends and behavior, for analytical purposes – generate extensive market research reports, which would be sold to prospective organizations and designers.

A platform to coordinate between designers and customers
Based on the client’s requirements, Open Source Development delivered to them a website that allowed users to browse through and search for designer collections. The various sections of the website are as follows:

• Collections: Online profiles created by designers to showcase their latest designs. Customers can browse through items within a collection and view details such as the history of a label, inspiration behind the collection, and design details. Users can select and add an item from within a collection to their profile.

• Directory: A comprehensive listing of retailers and their contact information including details such as price range and category. A detailed search has been provided that allows users to search for retailers based on parameters such as store type, location etc.

• Profiles: Profiles are personalized collection of items selected by the user from the designer’s collections. Provisions have been made to allow users to add comments to each item, rate them and sort them according to date added, its rating and designer. A user can share his/her profile with other users.

Open Source Development has built extensive user tracking functionalities into the website. Explicit user tracking is performed through a registration form. Implicit user tracking is done by capturing user actions within the website. The data is stored and is queried to generate market research reports.

In order to enable Administrators to manage the website and Designers to upload their collections to the website, Open Source Development developed separate back-end modules for both.

Administrator Module
Through this module Administrators can perform tasks such as:

• User Management: Administrators can add and manage back-end users i.e. Designers

• Collection Management: Administrators can browse through all the Collections created by Designers and approve a Collection before it appears on the website.

• Directory Management: Through this section Administrators can upload and manage the Retailer Directory.

• Advertisement Management: This section allows Administrators to manage details of advertisers and upload and manage advertisements displayed on the website. The Queue Management module within the Advertisement Manager allows administrators to assign advertisements to specific pages within the website. A tree system has been provided to enable Administrators to easily locate pages within the website. Administrators can generate comprehensive reports containing details such as click throughs. The reports can be viewed online or downloaded as Excel spreadsheets.

• Profile Management: Administrators can view the Profiles created by website users. Administrators can also create Profiles to showcase the designs and collections of leading designers, brands etc.

• Master Entries: Through this section Administrators can populate and manage various drop-down menus such as country, category, store types etc that appear on the website and back-end modules.

• Generate User Reports: This section allows administrators to generate and download reports. The reports are generated as an Excel spreadsheet.

Designer Module
The Designer Module provides Designers with interfaces to upload and manage their collections. Through this module Designers can perform tasks to:

• Update Personal Details

• Upload Collections: Interfaces have been provided that allow Designers to upload images to the server and add these images as items in the Collection.

• Create Retailer List: From the Retailer Directory, created by the Administrator, Designers can select and populate their retailer lists that would be displayed in their collections.

Technologies used in developing this application are:

                                


Summary
With the successful implementation and delivery of the solution, Open Source Development was able to meet the client’s requirement of creating an online style guide wherein users can get all style-related information they need and designers can have a platform to showcase their latest designs.