Client Work Website & e-Commerce Vak Bookshop
|
|
|
|
The predominantly light green palette lends a sober yet refreshing look to the site. The maroon and yellow highlights were used in buttons and widgets to bring some interest to the page design. |
||
|
The Challenge
VAK is a small bookstore in Pondicherry, INDIA with a relatively large number of dedicated customers from all around the world. It specialises in stocking books related to spirituality and a variety of philosophies both eastern and western, among many other topics of general interest. Over the years it has expanded its services to also include sales of photographs and videos on topics relating to the Sri Aurobindo Ashram. crossroad was approached to build a web-portal for VAK which would make available its entire catalogue of books and in due course of time its catalogue of photos, videos, gifts etc. As their limited infrastructure did not permit us to implement an entire end-to-end e-Commerce solution, we had to work within their technical limitations. We built a simple to navigate website for visitors to browse VAK's catalogue, search for titles using various search criteria and also to purchase items online using an integrated shopping cart.
|
|
|
|
The navigation links at the left of every page are grouped into logical sections giving access to a vereity of information and functionality in a convenient and consistent manner. |
|
|
|
||
As VAK did not maintain an electronic catalogue, the first step was to model their database and start off the process of keying in their catalogue. This later helped to develop their electronic billing and inventory applications, that they use in their retail outlet. Once the database was ready, we tailored it to suit the website and began developing the shopping cart and catalogue applications in PHP using MySQL as the backend database server. As they were not ready to accept online payments, which would have required them to also standardise shipping costs based on volume and weight, crossroad rounded-off the shopping process by the shopping cart application sending off an email with all order-related data for staff at VAK to follow up.
This worked very efficiently given VAKs existing workflow and has made the shopping experience for its online customers as pleasant as possible under the given conditions.
|
|
|
|
The masthead contains five prominent tabbed buttons for the five main sections of the website. Above these buttons are image links to various utility pages. |
|
|
|
||
The website was divided into five major sections accessible via five prominent tabs placed in the masthead of every page. These five sections correspond to the five product groups offered by Vak: Books, Photos, Music, Videos and Gift items.
The Result
VAK's website attracts many visitors from around the world and has helped this little bookshop reach out to a much larger global audience. Unique in its nature as a bookshop, VAK has been able to create a niche for itself both online as well as offline.
|
|
|
|
The home page of vaktrust.com showing an inside view of the showroom and four large image links at the bottom which are also available as button links on the left of every page just under the masthead. |
|
|
| Show me a larger image. |
||
|
||
