Projects: Ownership Resorts (phase one)

I am a little behind on updating my blog with some of my latest projects, sorry.  Thanks however to those of you who emailed me to make sure I wasn’t eaten by a shark on vacation!  I recently completed a project for a new client, Ownership Resorts.  If that name sounds familiar to you, it’s probably because these folks are primary sponsors on the Outdoor Channel’s RV Television Series.  I actually caught their commercial the other day and was quite impressed at how well they are promoting the project.

This project is basically an online database of RV Resorts across the United States and Canada that offer RV Lot Ownership as an option.  This is a pretty basic database with basic information about each resort including a few thumbnails for each resort. The client had a very specific look and feel in mind for the project so to accommodate his vision I relied heavily on some of my strategic partners and a few other developers to assist me in some new territories that I haven’t spent a lot of time working with in the past.  You will see a couple of cool JavaScript things in the solution as well, for example the photo mouseover effects accounted for an entire day to get it just right, but it was worth it in the end because the finished product is pretty cool. 

Another aspect of the project was the Resort Form Events.  When a visitor views a database record for e resort you will see that there is also a form located on each page.  I wrestled with a couple of ways to accomplish this but my friends at Xlinesoft (primarily Jane) convinced me that adding a new database table to store the leads in as opposed to just passing through the data was the best option.  In hindsight she was 100% right.  At first the client didn’t need to store this information, but after some consideration he and I both agreed that this was in his best interest to do so. Coding the Database Record View pages using Smarty Template Engine was another task all in itself.  There are just some things in Smarty that are a little different when it comes to inserting scripts into the .htm file.  I learned a lot about Smarty during this project as well as further my knowledge of PHPR IDE, it was definitely a time saver on this project. 

If you would like to take a look at the first phase of the Ownership Resorts Project, click here… I will probably release an official press release about the website over the next week or so, stay tuned…