Topic awaiting preservation: "Customize our product" suggestion?? (Page 1 of 1)

Hey. I am not sure where to put this so let me ask the question.

Have you seen those site where you can customize a product (such as a car). It gives you a base model with color choices, interior, sunroof or not. That kind of thing? I know that the miniusa.com site has it but they are doing some maintenance so I can use that as an example.

I need to do this kind of thing for the company I work for but not sure of the best approach. I know they (miniusa) use Flash. But I am not that good at flash ( I could figure it out though). The only thing is, is that I want it to be easy to add new products in the future.

The company that I work for builds guitar amplifiers. We have quite a few (right now for this we are going to concentrate on one only), but in the future I'd like for it to be easy to add more lines.

Is Flash easy to add to without screwing up the timeline of the movie and such? Any other suggestions for an approach?

Thanks in advance!

Later,

C:\

I'm not fully sure what your after exactly, but this sounds like all you need is a few layers of gifs with transparency. Does the image (if there is an image) need to be animated ? To answer your question about flash ive used it for a little bit and the only answer I can give you is "i'd say its easy to do that.".

Other than graphics, all you need is checkboxes

Try post an image of a basic model and then with-an-upgrade image.

I've worked on a site where the products were available in several colors. The principle works for any number of custom attribute. The website was in DHTML and database driven. We had a table for all the Products, one for all the Colors, and a relation table to say in which colors a given product was available. The back office was straight forward, and allowed to add some Colors, and when the admins added a Product they had a multiple select for the colors and were asked to upload a screenshot of the product in each color they checked. Dead simple.

You could well replace the database by a bunch of XML or flat text files.



(Edited by poi on 02-24-2005 15:00)

You are not talking about 3D models, are you?

well I guess the best that I can show as an example is this : http://www2.saabusa.com/build/

I like the Miniusa version better but it's down

I think poi is on the right track. It should be easy enough to do with dhtml and a database. Just have to write an interface to upload pictures and what not.

thanks for the help!!!

Later,

C:\

MINI fr also has a customization page. It's done in Java, and the HTML markup sucks. Why did they use Java ?! DHTML can handle that, and much more, hands up. You can use xmlHttpRequest or remote scripting ( if you aim obsolete browsers ) to enhance the user interface.

wow........that does suck. the usa version is MUCH better. But it is flash.

I think i might have to stay away from xmlhttpRequest just because some of our customers have old IE versions. At any rate, i think that with some dHTML, php and a database, I can pull this off without having to venture into Flash.

Later,

C:\

www.nikeid.com

They do a pretty good job with it, although I can't help you I wish you Good Luck.


Edit: Realized you are looking for something that doesn't use Flash, sorry, good luck still.

(Edited by xcFeRiNiZeDcc on 02-25-2005 03:25)