Simply Wines

Simply Wines is a Victoria-based online wine store with an emphasis on simplicity. The site is a fully-fledged database-driven e-commerce site with moderately sophisticated content management. The site includes an administration panel for managing currently active specials, inventory, sales and many other business functions.

The power and extensibility of the Zend Framework in the PHP language was leveraged to drive operations. jQuery is employed to create the navigation feature visible on the main and 'Browse' pages. A dense relational mySQL database stores site data.

A requirement of the site was to be universally compatible regardless of browser, so a good deal of work went into ensuring correct display in Internet Explorer 6 & 7, as well as more modern platforms. A robust general CSS stylesheet was developed and browser-targeted stylesheets developed where necessary. Graceful degradation was employed for areas where the same calibre of user experience on legacy platforms was not possible.

The entire 3 month lifecycle of this project was challenging and educational, both in programming and designing a site of such a scale but also in communicating with and understanding the needs of the client.