Web Site Creation Story

Zozoban Incorporated designs corporate business cards. Well, that’s a bit of an understatement–they are the premier providers of very trendy business cards for Fortune 1000 companies. In particular, they are experts in quick turnaround orders for companies that like to spin their image every few months.

Recently, Zozoban has noticed that demand for new card designs surge just before major industry conferences. This is especially noticable in the technology industry, where each new conference demands a new identity (new buzzwords are unveiled and must be embraced).

In the past year, the conference demand has made it difficult for Zozoban to keep up. So, they finally caught a clue and decided to bring their business more fully to the web. Unfortunately, Internet World was only 2 months away. Part of the Internet World hype was to have the flashiest, most time relevant business cards available to catch the eye of potential clients and partners. New businesses and old, they all greased up their marketing machinery for the show. Cards were a big part of this.

Zozoban had no problem generating the cards and delivering them in a matter of a few days, but working with corporations that wanted minor tweaks (add a new employee, change the catchphrase or color) took a toll on their rather small staff. Sue, their innovative new Web SiteArchitect, suggested that most of this could easily be done through the Web. Little did Sue realize that they would simply say “Do it.”. Unfortunately, they added “..and have it ready 1 month before Internet World”.

ZPT To The Rescue

Sue enlisted her resident Presentation Designer, Jeff, to do the mock ups. She didn’t want to wait weeks before getting feedback from her bosses. Jeff used GoLive to generate an overall look and feel page that would be the model for all pages on the site. Jeff had no idea what ZPT was, but he was willing to learn as he went. Sue told him that she would do the initial structuring, all she wanted from Jeff was a single page representing the general layout.

Sue downloaded ZPT and installed it into her departmental Zope instance. She told Jeff to save his page (using WebDAV) into http::/internal/mastertemps/masterlookandfeel.html. She had previously created it as an empty page and checked off the ‘notify me on changes’ option.

A couple of hours later, Sue was notified by email (by Zope) that Jeff had modified masterlookandfeel.html. Sue used her own favorite editor, emacs, to modify the file. She turned the page into a METAL macro by adding the attribute metal:define-macro to the html tag. Jeff had inserted divs and spans into the areas where they expected the business card application to show through. Sue paramatized these areas as slots. This is where the content would plug in. This also reminded Sue that she need to get Ulrich, her ZopeProgrammer, started on developing Zope methods to access the corporate database which held the card design information as well as client contacts.

Sue’s overall design was to have corporate clients log into the site, look at their current battery of cards (previously designed for them by Zozoban), and annotate them with the changes they needed. Perhaps she would also throw in the capability to show them new stock designs for their casual perusal. Maybe she would even allow potential clients browse such designs without having a corporate login. But, no matter any new features she could dream of, they would amount to nothing if she couldn’t get a prototype of the site up and running. Ulrich would work on the back end logic, she could work out the requirements with him later. Right now, she needed to focus on the prototype.

Before calling Jeff, Sue created a general page to contain the application. She called this page, simply enough, “main.html”. This page was wrapped in a metal:use-macro attribute that would bring in the master look and feel template. She wrote metal:fill-slot attributes on tables and text that she wanted to supply to the template (so that they would show through). This would eventually be populated with the results of Ulrich’s code. But, that wasn’t anywhere near ready, so Sue provided some sample content.

When Jeff got Sue’s email, he used GoLive to download “main.html”. He was a bit confused. It looked like Sue had copied his master layout to this file. Didn’t she realize what a waste of duplication that would be? Glancing back at her email, he noticed she had written that he should edit the layout of her sample content here, making adjustments as needed. Her tables were badly formed, and the fonts were all wrong. Jeff made changes and saved them back to Zope. Jeff also needed to change the master layout a bit to adjust to the oddly sized table that would be needed to show the card samples. He brought up “masterlookandfeel.html” and tweaked the layout. He closed “main.html” and opened it up again. The master look and feel changes appeared.

to be continued…

Comments

smw (Sep 21, 2001 2:43 pm; Comment #1) Editor Remark Requested –

Please consider finishing this, it’s great!