Artisanship of Unique and Custom Jewelry and Gem Art

by Patrick Slavenburg — last modified Jan 05, 2009 01:34 PM
The primary goal was to create a platform that artists in the field of gem sculpture and jewelry design without much knowledge of computers could use, and that consumers would find easy to navigate, browse, search, collect and interact.
Site Artisanship of Unique and Custom Jewelry and Gem Art
Industry Consumer Goods and Services
Location United States
Contact Farlang Team

Overview: 

Our aim was to build a platform that integrated all different groups within the same theme: unique gemstones and jewelry. From museums to exclusive dealers, from exhibits to the world's leading jewelry designers.

Since these are not typically groups that work much with computers interfaces had to be made es easy to use as Facebook, but less overwhelming. At the same time visitors to the site need many different ways to navigate, search, browse, organize and discover content.

The team of editors can create blogs, articles, books, online exhibits, thematic pages and more. Algorithms have been written to connect content, and provide recommendations and have been tested succesfully. A rare book library of 25,000 OCR'd pages has been created as well.

Finally a website is only good if people can find it which meant search engine friendly internal structure, page optimization andlinkbuilding had to be performed as well as the potential to interact with social media.

The idea is that anyone who can use email and MS Word should be able to use Farlang.com

 

Key Highlights: 

  • Interactivity for the user has been implemented: from tagging to voting, from organizing to sharing. Users can create and name their own lists, add items to it, and copy items from one list to another, then share the list or publish it on their profile as a slideshow.
  • Artists have a user friendly back-end area: a batch upload with progress bar, and thumbnails appearing AJAX style after uploading. They can drag&drop organize, create slideshows and edit their own profiles with a usability *at least* on par with Facebook
  • Editors can quickly create blogs, articles, online exhibits, thematic pages and more, thus creating connections between different areas of the platform.
  • 25,000 pages of gem and jewelry rare books have been brought online, with navigation per page, chapter lists, tags and recommendation algorithm. Highlighting+annotation will be added shortly
  • Plone's basic url-structure and templates make it easy for search engines to crawl once the page is launched.
  • Coreblog has been used for blogging, which can now be linked to artist's profile
  • Although CMS and Social Networking are somewhat at odds with each other, we allow each artist to link to other artists, share images with them (for example in a joint collaborative work).
  • Events can be added by each artist individually and published on their profile. 
  • Thematic pages can aggregate most recent activity see for example our page for gemstones and gem art or our page for Designer Jewelry.
  • We created a directory for other websites with a double menu system such as our Fine and Diamond Jewelry. It is part of the WWW Virtual Library, founded by Tim Berners Lee.

About the Techonologies:

We used Plone 2.5 and added several Zope3 + Five products. We partially created our own products, but partially used existing products for articles, images, the blog etc. Although Plone has an issue with social networking functionalities, we still find much "social networking" is in fact "interactivity" or "collaboration", both elements that Plone can handle very well.

On the client-side we made use of JQuery scripts to create an easier accesible interface:

  • Login/registration process uses a pop-up, also in areas where activities require login. Pop up shows both registration/login process and have a password strength as well as user-name availability check
  • Artists can create their own url, in the "profiles" folder: a url would look like /profiles/my-name-here
  • There is a batch image upload using SWF Upload: it not only allows for multiple image upload, but also shows a queue which can be edited before uploading. During uploading the color changes of the item that is uploaded + progress bar. After uploading the item turns green, and a thumbnail image of the upload appears at the bottom, so artists can exactly follow what has been uploaded and what not.
  • Drag&Drop functionality + Jeroen Wijering flash player -> create your own slideshow. Eventually an embed code will be added as well.
  • Voting or adding items to a personal list can be done after logging in, which does not require leaving the page.