I was recently asked to build a website for a mirror framing company based in the East End (London), Britannia Mirrors Ltd.

The initial brief asked for a site that would show a gallery of their products, but as they sell to the trade only, they wanted people to register & provide contact details so that they would be able to follow up who was visiting/using the site. They also wanted customers to register with them before being able to download copies of their catalogue and price list which would be available from the site.

Unfortunately, the client did used to have a website at www.britanniamirrors.com, but let the domain expire & now it is owned by a domain name company who haven’t responded to my enquiries about buying the name back (why buy up names & then never reply to people who want to buy them when that is supposedly your business?!). We therefore had to go for www.britanniamirrorsltd.co.uk :o/

My initial thought was to build a site using a shopping cart package like osCommerce, which although primarily for building an e-commerce store, does have the ability to have the cart turned off, leaving a simple gallery & registration system. However, the client felt this was too complex & preferred a simpler design.

I then decided to run with a mainly CSS based site with a registration & login system, allowing access to an image gallery & the download page. The site design itself was pretty straightforward, the time consuming task was working with the large number of images that had to be pulled from the PDF based catalogue, resized & in some cases cropped/rotated!

Once the images were sorted, the next step was to create the gallery & I tried a number of options before settling on an Image Thumbnail Viewer Script from Dynamic Drive. This launched a nice, centred, bordered image when selected & even allows for some text to be added to the enlarged image.

The final element was to create the registration & login system, which is using a mySQL database & asks users to register before allowing access to the gallery categories and the catalogue download pages. There have been a few teething problems with the registration due to not much time for testing; the client was already telling people the site was live! But all seems fine now & no further issues have arisen.

I’m pretty pleased with the site and just waiting for some home page copy & additional photos, from the client, to fill/brighten it up a little before signing off on it.