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Bluewater
Books & Charts Bluewater is one of the largest retailers of nautical charts, both paper and electronic, in the recreational marine industry. They have retail stores in Fort Lauderdale, FL, and Newport, RI. Their market is the affluent boating public, the owners of boats typically over 40 feet in length. They also cater to the professional crews of megayachts prominent in Fort Lauderdale. | "Excellent communicator, both verbal and written."
Rob Handley
Bluewater Books & Charts
| I was originally hired to manage Bluewater's extensive print advertising campaigns -- pre-press for four-color ads, editing and desktop publishing of newsletters, public and staff publications -- but e-commerce was catching on in 1996 and I became the project manager for the company's first website. The tools available for database-driven websites were rudimentary. I grew dissatisfied with the site produced by the company contracted for the project and learned to code myself, eventually producing a commercial website that offered over 3,500 products for sale, the most successful site in it's niche market. - Optimized the site for search engine ranking (metatags, keywords, and text weighting)
- Mounted an aggressive campaign to generate inbound links as part of our search engine strategy
- Edited and wrote copy for Bluewater's newsletter, both print and web
- Migrated the newsletter from print to web
Several years after I left Fort Lauderdale, I was contracted by Rob Handley, Bluewater's IT Manager, to build their website's replacement. The requirements for the site's information architecture were daunting: take all of the cartographers' disparate means of geographically categorizing their products and make them comparable -- apples to apples, oranges to oranges. This level of complexity and functionality existed nowhere among Bluewater's competitors.
I imposed a uniform schema upon this cartographic chaos by mapping products to a meta-schema, then categorizing products at the meta rather than product level. An extensive suite of admin tools supports the assignment of product characteristics and meta-categorization. The site relies entirely on stored procedures, recordsets returned as arrays, and recursive subprocedures to display hierarchical data and maintain speed of delivery.
Since Bluewater's back office is supported by Ecometry, there were also challenges transporting data between a SQL Server 2000 database and the output of what was essentially a flat file. The solution was a suite of Data Transformation jobs that automated the complex procedures and kept the data flowing.
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