Portfolio

SIMON RIGBY
28b Lady Somerset Road
London
NW5 1UP

PROFILE AND CAREER HISTORY
PORTFOLIO

Just France

The automation of the Just France website was the biggest and most challenging project I undertook at Inghams, and was also the principal focus of my employment there. Just France was the last of the Inghams websites to need conversion to dynamic generation for ease of maintenance. The content was stored in a Macintosh Primebase database used by the brochure production department to produce the paper version of the brochures.

The web process was invoked over two stages. The first would pull the required information from the Primebase database into a dynamically generated SQL Server database, using a configuration script do implement the table structure. The second would pull the information from the SQL Server database, and, using customised Perl modules and another configuration script, populate the hand-coded HTML templates with the content and build the site. It was necessary to have 2 stages to minimise the load on the Primebase database, as changes to the templates would only necessitate rebuilding from the SQL Server database.

I extended the initial requirements in certain areas as the project moved along when I felt that the alterations would be of benefit to the users, as I was given a free hand to develop the system as I saw fit. The most notable of these alterations concerned the property pages for locations that housed more than one property. In these instances I generated a dynamic HTML menu from a javascript template linking the properties together so that users could easily see the variety of properties on offer at their preferred location, and perhaps choose an alternative that was closer to their ideal holiday property.