Design

The Design section of each chapter is devoted to discussing the problem and designing a solution. This usually means writing down a list of business requirements and desired features to implement, as well as the design of the necessary database objects for the data storage, and the structure of the classes to retrieve, manipulate, and present the data to the user. At the beginning of a project you start out by thinking about your client's needs, and how you might meet those needs, and possibly even expand on them to give your client more functionality than the minimum needed, while still staying within your time limits and budgetary guidelines. As stated in the problem section, your client in this scenario is a pub owner who wants to have a web site to promote her pub, providing online information about upcoming events, reports about past events, and more. This initial idea can be expanded in many ways, to create a site that has a lot more interesting things, good for its users (who are also potential customers for the physical pub) and for the store owner. We can begin by writing down a list of features that a modern content-based site should have, and a few reasons why they are useful:

• An appealing user interface. Appearance is important, since it's the first thing users will notice — well before appreciating the site's functionality and services. But the graphics are not all that matters regarding the UI. The information on the site must be well organized and easily reachable. The site must be usable and provide a good (and possibly great) user experience, which means that users must find it easy to browse and interact with. Some attention should also be given to cross-browser compatibility, i.e., ensuring that the site looks and behaves fine from different platforms and browsers. This is especially true for sites like this one, where you can't know in advance which browser your customers will use, as you might know in the case of an intranet site for a corporation, for example.

• A successful content-based site owes its popularity to its users. Loyal users who regularly visit the site, help write content, and participate in polls and special events are those who guarantee that the site will keep growing. To build a vibrant community of active members, users must have some sort of identity, something that describes and distinguishes them among other members. Because of this, the site needs a registration feature, as part of a larger authentication/authorization infrastructure. This will also be used to grant and restrict access to some areas of the site.

• The site needs a constant supply of fresh content to stay alive and vibrant. If the content becomes stale, visitors will lose interest in the site and won't visit it anymore. A pub's site can't be very good unless it has regular updates about upcoming events, parties, and concerts. What's the point in visiting the site if it doesn't display photos that were shot at the last party? To facilitate a constant stream of new content, the site needs some mechanism that enables the editor to easily update it with dynamic content. Furthermore, the editor who will be in charge of the content updates will probably not be a technical person, so you must build some simple administration pages that make updates easy, even for nontechnical people.

• Once the site has new content ready to be read, the site's manager must have some way to inform its users about this. Not all users visit the site every day, so the site manager must be proactive and notify the customers about recent updates. If customers have registered on the site, providing their e-mail address, they might also have requested to receive a newsletter notifying them about recent changes and additions to the site. Of course, there are also other ways to syndicate news, such as exposing Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds to which a user can register and then control from their favorite RSS reader, and get automatic notifications about news without having to visit the site daily to get the information.

• A site like this can also be a good opportunity to get feedback from customers about a variety of issues: What do they like most in a pub? What brand of beer do they prefer? Do they want to listen to live music while drinking with friends, or perhaps they don't like all that noise? Establishing some kind of user-to-site communication is important, and if you get a good number of responses it can even lead to strategic decisions and changes that may improve the business.

• If the presence of some sort of user-to-site communication is important, user-to-user communication may be even more so, because that's the central point of creating a community of loyal users, who come to the site frequently to chat, discuss the news posted on the site, ask suggestions to the others about upcoming events, and more. This translates into more traffic on the site, and a feeling of membership that will pay off in both the short and long run.

• Once the store has a discreet user base, the store's owner may decide to expand it so that it supports an online store. In fact, the pub already offers a catalog of products for beer enthusiasts, such as glasses, T-shirts, key chains, and more. If the site has a lot of traffic, it may be a good way to promote these products so people can place orders without even visiting the pub in person. And once users see a product and like it, they can rate that product to tell other people how much they like it. The online store must be easy to manage by nontechnical people, because it might possibly be the pub's owner who adds and edits products, and manages the orders, so there must be a module with a simple and intuitive UI that automates as many operations as possible, and guides the user through the tasks.

• With the site offering news and articles, lists of products, user-to-user discussions, and other dynamic content, it's easy to imagine that the home page could easily become crowded, and possibly more difficult to read and understand because of too much information. It would be good if the user herself could build her own home page, according to what she is interested in. Maybe she wants to read about upcoming events, but doesn't care about shopping online for gadgets? Great, we want to give her the capability to do that, by adding and deleting content to and from the home page, or maybe just moving around the existing content so that it's placed and organized in a way that she finds more comfortable and useful for her. This type of customization is done on some large sites such as Windows Live and My MSN, for example, and is a great example of personalization, which helps encourage users to decide to register on the site.

• As mentioned previously, the pub is typically visited by a lot of customers coming from many different countries, and the pub's owner expects the same to happen for the web site. Because of this, the site must be partially or fully translated into multiple languages, making it easy for most users to understand it. Not only text must be translated; information such as dates and numbers should also be displayed according to the user's preferred locale settings, so that nobody will misunderstand an announcement about an upcoming party or event.

To recap everything in a few words, the TheBeerHouse site will have everything a modern content-based site will have, including dynamic articles and news, polls for user-to-site communication, forums for user-to-user communication, newsletters and RSS feeds to notify members about new content on the site, an e-commerce store for selling products online, home page personalization, and content localization.

Although the sample project is built around a fictitious pub, you'll recognize in this list of requirements the common features of the majority of content- and commerce-based sites you find online now, and sites that you're likely to develop in the near future, or maybe even sites you're developing right now.