Gluten-Free Jubilee
Visit Work
I was asked in early 2010 to design and build a website for my aunt's new book, Gluten-Free Jubilee.
My aunt, who has experience eating healthy foods void of gluten, asked me to help her promote her new book, Gluten-Free Jubilee, with a colorful website. I had never had experience designing websites for book sales and looked forward to getting involved with a new type of website project.
I designed and built the GFJ website to allow my aunt, who has limited computer experience, to be able to edit and create new content for the website. I wanted the site to be visually attractive, flexible, and fun. In order to accomplish this, I used vector graphics to create a rolling hillside and warm sky in the background. I put the book itself right front and center.
Editing Site Content
As for the rest of the page content, I wanted to create a flexible way of rearranging and editing page content with limited computer experience. I again turned to Ruby on Rails, with which I built a system that allows for an authenticated site administrator to create page components with one or two floated columns that contain one or more content cells. The user simply creates a new page (which gets added to the top menu automatically), adds a page components, specifies the width of the right column (which could be 100% or 0% as well, making the component contain only one column), then adds these generic content cells to the page.
A content cell can contain different kinds of formatted content based on the needs of the website - cells can contain HTML-formatted text, a specially formatted testimonial quote about the book, or even one or more images. All administrative links appear only when an administrator user is successfully logged into the website. In addition, these controls pop over the website in an unobtrusive way.
E-Commerce Integration
One other goal of this project was to integrate e-commerce together with the front-facing website to allow people to purchase the book and to allow my aunt to manage book sales through the website back-end. I used the restful_authentication Rails plugin to automatically generate accounts for downloading the book once a purchase confirmation is successfully received.
Paypal is used for managing all payments. All orders are tracked from within the site using a special page that is available only when an administrator logs into the website. Everything is fast, automatic, and simple.
Last Updated on Aug 14, 2011