The fundamental idea behind the Integration site is demonstrating how varied design elements and tools intelligently come together to make a great site, however fictitious this Book Company may be. However, my limited resources only allow me for the moment to propose varied features that a real company website might have. I cannot implement them here, but I assume that they exist for the scope of this design.
For instance, a true e-business would have a massive product database available on their company computer system, and a programming staff (hopefully keeping in touch with the graphical/website design staff) who would integrate the database with the web server. This can be done in a variety of ways with different platforms, servers, databases, languages, and methods, according to the company's needs and resources. This site is primarily concerned with only the design and user interface to such a web database.
I shall collect all proposed features here on one page.
proposal of features for the site
The Virtual Book Club is a site implemented as either a Chat Room, mailing list, or a message Board for visitors of Integration.
proposal of features for the site
description
proposal of features for the site
Bookworms are staff members of the fictitious Book Company who specialize in the different genres of fiction upon the site. They recommend quality titles within their genre, which are continuously featured at the front Index page. This particular link was meant to access an HTML document that contains the photos, names, and biographies/qualifications of each expert Bookworm, so that site visitors may get to know the Bookworm(s) covering their genre(s) of interest.
This fictitious Book Company (and its target customers) prefer the personal touch of human guides to its book collection.
proposal of features for the site
No site can do without a FAQ list. This a convenient way to give useful general help information directly to the user, rather than having innumerable customers email the same questions and wait for a response.
proposal of features for the site
If the more complex features of the site such as the book catalog and virtual book club are well tested on a variety of platforms, modem speeds, and browsers first, errors should be minimal. But the bugs that do get by need to be reported well. This form should collect useful information from the user, validate the data with client-side cgi (or other) processing, then send the data via a post method to whatever staff members handle these types of computer, not customer service, problems.
proposal of features for the site
description
proposal of features for the site
description
Some, but not all, fonts on this website link to PFR (portable font resource) files from the Bitstream Truedoc website. Bitstream makes these PFR files freely available to users on the web, as a promotion of their portable font technology, which streams a font's character shapes to a website, but allows the normal display of regular text while the special fonts are loading. The stylesheets which implement these PFRs also specify other readable alternative fonts that are likely to be on user's computer. None of this site's design depends absolutely on how these PFR fonts appear. It is bad design practice to rely so heavily on the presentation for meaning, at the expense of basic structure, readability, and usability. In any case, Bitstream's PFR technology will only currently perform on Netscape 4.0+ browsers and IE 4.0 for Windows browsers.
These fonts are used simply to give an interesting, but dispensable, effect to the browsers that can display them. The text appears no matter what, and the propietary fonts are never actually saved to the users' computers, making the portable fonts secure. Moreover, the fictitious Book Company may choose to purchase a "font burner" tool from Bitstream which allows Book Company to create (or "burn") a PFR file for any font that Book Company already has. The font burning tool also specifies on what website a PFR file may be used, thereby preventing other people from saving and using the author's PFR file on their own websites.
| A table actually put to tabular use... | ||||
| That degrades more gracefully than most. | ||||
| Rank | Votes | Author | Title | ISBN |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. | 221 | C. Doyle | Illustrated Sherlock Holmes | #-####-###-# |
| 2. | 123 | J. Dinnen | For Love of Galahad | #-####-###-# |
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