Site Builder

1998, BellSouth.net
Comments only; no documentation available.

Problem

Build a server-based, extremely robust, very easy-to-use product that would allow non-technical business customers to quickly build professional-looking, e-commerce web sites.

Solution

An e-commerce platform called Intershop had previously been selected for this project. I was the lead developer on a team of three developers and three artists.

Together, we designed a set of web-site templates. Each template contained the same 8 pages, which provided a way to display the customers' corporate data and products for sale. Each template also specified a set of colors, fonts, and other general settings. We then built a Control Panel that interviewed a customer, asking her what information she wanted to display on her corporate web site and inviting her to select and preview a template.

Using those resources, we customized Intershop to do the following:

• Store and manage an ever-changing set of web-site templates, according to the needs of the BellSouth marketing department.

• Generate a web site for each customer by blending her Control Panel settings with the template she had selected. Each template would reconfigure itself to match the customer's settings. For example, if the customer omitted the "About Us" information, there would be no About Us page in the resulting web site. Or, for example, if the customer omitted a phone number, that phone number would seamlessly vanish from the several pages which could use it.

• Generate Shopping Cart pages for each web site according the user-specified categories and products for sale, as well as the font and color settings for each template.

• Support multiple simultaneous users. The original Intershop product was designed to be sold to a single company, which would then hire programmers to install and customize it. We customized the product to support multiple corporate customers, ensuring that each customer's products and corporate information were only visible through that customer's web site.

HCI Notes

A couple of specific HCI-related notes for this project:

• The product is designed to be customer-friendly. As noted above, the business customer's job is easy: type some data, and see a web site. The process takes about 15 minutes. The product is robust: pages add or remove themselves, and, within a specific page, individual features do the same, according to the customer's data, in real time.

• The product is also designed to be friendly to our customers' customers. I carefully adjusted the software generating each template so that our customers' customers would never, ever, ever see a broken web page, a missing link, or an unseemly hole in a design. Most of this work was done in Perl; languages such as ASP and PHP—which make such customizations relatively easy—had not yet been invented.

• BellSouth has many millions of telephone customers in the southeastern United States. We needed to ensure that as many of them as possible could use the product, so we made every page of this product work on every Windows and Macintosh browser we could. As a result, we used very little JavaScript or other client-side code; almost all the software was server-side.

• The Control Panel user interface was modeled after the UI used by BellSouth.net's existing business-products web site, to increase the comfort of the potential customers.

In addition, I believe this product was one of the first commercially-available Application Service Provider products available; when we began working on it, the term "Application Service Provider" had not yet been coined. In ASPs, an entire product is hosted on a central server, so that the customer needs only a Web browser to use it. There is no software for the customer to install; the customer can upgrade her home or corporate computer at any time, without affecting—indeed, only improving—the performance of the product.

Environment

Intershop was written in Perl, with a third-party database built into the product, so we all learned to customize those two things. I spent a good bit of time in California at the Intershop headquarters, learning about Intershop from the engineers who built it.