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UK magazine store United News Shops came to Headland Multimedia with an interesting project - they wanted a Web site that would allow them to sell 3,500 magazines on-line to people anywhere in the world. The project sounded great, but when the client hit us with the timescale - just eight weeks get the site ready for launch - we had to think carefully about the best e-commerce solution to use. We looked seriously at using an off-the-shelf e-commerce package but in the end felt that a custom solution using a scripting language such as PERL was needed to fully match the clients brief. The resulting site contains the usual e-commerce shopping basket mechanism, plus a searchable back-end database, creditcard verification and secure transactions via a SSL server. It was delivered on-time and we were even able to build in a comprehensive user tracking system into the project to allow the client to accurately monitor the number of visitors to the site and orders placed. I can't imagine a better tool than PERL for building a system such as this. The flexibility of the language allowed us to implement almost everything the client requested of us and we now have a "product" that can be adapted for use on other projects. For a live demo have a look at http://www.britishmagazines.com/ or come to our home page at http://www.headland.co.uk/. Oh yes, and just to put the icing on the cake, being cross-platform we were able to build the entire site on Macintosh in the office prior to uploading it to a SGI Web server!
Sean Clark, Multimedia Director |