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Back during the Easter Season this year we were approached about creating a rental product/service catalog and e-commerce web site for a new unique service company, EventDrapery.com, guided by Marina Miller here in Atlanta. This project required the creation of a searchable database of products, an electronic forms system, a shopping cart, the usual "about us" and "FAQs" modules and many "behind the scenes" pages, documents and web tricks. A sales-oriented website can involve hundreds and even thousands of considerations. This article is a detailed case study designed to let you peer inside one of our more complex projects.
If you haven’t already tried it or want to see it again, click once or twice on the play button in the drapery video above to see the drapery set itself up from scratch. Those clip-joint drapes are actually 12 feet tall. The Macromedia Flash video you see is made up of four kinds of photographic efforts: The flame retardant drapes were shot on location with an 8 mega-pixel Minolta DimageA2 camera. I used four Dynalite 1000x professional photographic strobe units with white umbrellas to evenly light the large area of at least 144 square feet.
The shiny metal bases, uprights and crossbars were photographed in our studio. Final artwork pieces for the opening curtain were created using Photoshop layers and the Photoshop—>Transform—>Scale command to open the drapes in several steps by squeezing them to the left and right from the center. The resulting layers were brought into ImageReady to create the animation along a timeline. The final movie was exported as an animated .gif file, but the Flash videos captured for this article were created with computer screen-recording software in real time at 30fps, then brought into video-editing software and compiled as Flash movies. In the future we will add some background music to complete our animation scenes. We are currently studying podcasts and beginning to create soundtracks with Apple’s Macintosh-based GarageBand.
To their customers EventDrapery rents out all of the necessary installation equipment and accessories as well as a wide range of fabrics. At addition cost, they supply the labor pool needed to deliver, install and eventually uninstall the drape on location. The phrase "I&D" is a standard term in the event industry which means "Install and Dismantle." There is quite a lot of work involved "behind the scenes" for the folks at EventDrapery as they create your scene.
When events are planned, people need drapery backdrops for weddings, show business productions, personal appearances by dignitaries and stars, tradeshows and product roll-outs. EventDrapery.com fulfills this hidden need. It handles the fancy backdrops and unique fabric installations that contribute to the excitement, importance and distinctive look of any event. So, here’s a concept and business model whose time has come, 💡 and whose offerings are so obvious that we slapped our foreheads thinking, "well, of course– why didn’t we think of this? We hope they make millions!"
When a person, group or company plans a shindig, they often need staging and designerly backdrops of some kind, whether it is fancy white satin drape for a wedding, 12 foot tall leopard prints for an Elvis revival, or a lush red raspberry velour setting behind a popular band or product roll-out— or maybe when the mayor presents a visiting celeb the key to the city. The clipjoint sparkling drapes offered by EventDrapery.com are quite beautiful when they catch the light. The Lamour Chocolate is as warm and rich as smooth hot chocolate on a cold morning.
In the past couple of days Norma has installed a new interactive photo gallery on the EventDrapery website to show off some of their installations. Over time I’m sure the image collection will become one of the nicest features of the site. As you will see, EventDrapery.com rents more than backdrops. They install fabric structures on ceilings and celebratory entrance and exit setups.
The EventDrapery album features a user-initiated timed slideshow created using the open-source php programming language on a Linux-based Apache server. You can reach the showcase by going to EventDrapery.com and clicking on their logo, or you can take a shortcut and click on either the image to your right or the one just below this paragraph. A quick view of the showcase shows that they "hang out" at the Georgia Aquarium ballroom with such stars as Larry King of CNN fame (lucky people . . . ) as well as a number of other venues. Currently EventDrapery focuses mostly on the southeastern United States, although they might be doing Vegas or L.A. as well while we aren’t looking.
When you begin planning a celebration or meeting, you need guidance from professionals to keep up with current trends in color fashion and materials appropriate to your audience. You need elegant design to portray and enhance your message. You want your attendees to have a great time but you don’t need the hassle of prepping the setup or owning the drapery and hardware once the event is over. After all, where would you store it? How would you insure it is legally flame retardant? EventDrapery.com will take care of all of that for you!
At Art on Disk, we played many different roles in the creation of the EventDrapery.com website– in fact the project demanded some of almost everything we do here– studio and location photography, design, artwork production, computer graphics, web development, multimedia animation, writing, forms creation, backup systems for the site and database development. . . oh, and we also trained our clients in administering the site and understanding its internal features, then made software training videos delivered to them on DVD.
After I created studio product photographs of the hardware and equipment as well as several full-length drapery installations, we ran them through morphing software in combination with Adobe ImageReady to create the animated results that you will find on the EventDrapery.com front page. I have embedded some of the morphing animations into this web log below. Click the "play" buttons:
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One of our greatest challenges as the developers of this e-commerce site was to find a way to "almost complete the transaction" between the customer and the EventDrapery company without actually taking payments over the Internet. Almost every shopping cart-based model for e-Commerce includes a final payment module revolving around a secure site certificate and credit card payments. This site is more like a "request for services and estimates." That means that the paperwork part of the business transaction, the estimate of how much it might cost to rent draperies of particular kinds in certain quantities, the reservations for a particular time and place of delivery, and an estimate/invoice had to be generated through a wish list/shopping cart paradigm without a final payment. Therefore, we had to invent some workarounds to hijack the transaction outcome without derailing the business process. That meant learning enough php programming to get the job done. 😯
To be more specific, after a customer makes his or her selections from the catalog, they begin the checkout sequence. During checkout, the electronic paperwork transforms into an "order placement" transaction model instead of a "charge my credit card" model. Shipping information is collected just the same as a standard e-store transaction, with the ability to indicate the venue address as being different from the customer billing address. It’s all quite logical.
Once a customer walks through the process of selecting and ordering drapery, a copy of the order is sent to customer service at EventDrapery.com for review and a second copy is sent to the customer. EventDrapery reviews the project order and the summary of charges, contacts the customer to discuss the event and verify availability and pricing, and then completes the order. The EventDrapery administrator can log in and change the order and resend an updated estimate/invoice to the customer via e-mail or snail mail as many times as necessary to complete the transaction agreed upon by both parties. Currently, financial arrangements for actual payment are finalized by phone and through regular mail, not through the Internet. Because a customer’s order may change several times before the final estimate becomes a final bill, credit card payments wouldn’t make sense. The process of renting drapery and finalizing labor details is an incremental, evolutionary process.
In this case, the power of the Internet is helping to bring customer and vendor together in meaningful ways to expedite and accomplish useful work, saving time, money, energy, gasoline and nervous systems.
EventDrapery.com provides a complete on-line pricing guide which explains how to measure a room or a stage area to determine how many linear feet of drapery a particular project will require and what formulas to use to calculate approximate job costs. As we worked on the site we mistakenly thought that "linear feet" referred to how tall the draperies were, such as 12 feet or 20 feet. However, the term refers to the horizontal distance across an area, such as a stage measured from left to right— or the sum of distances all the way around three or more sides of a room, for example. The linear footage is one of the major determinants in price calculations.
Well, now you know all about the EventDrapery.com business model. 8) At Art on Disk we try to understand the business and administrative structure of a company or organization as well as its identity, mission and goals in order to create the most useful long-term solutions. Don’t hesitate to call us at 770-577-3201 if you or someone you know needs corporate identity solutions, technical writing, logos, illustrations, advertising and catalog photographs, an on-line photo album or website, or as you see, a custom e-commerce site complete with shopping carts and wish lists along with SSL (secure socket layer) capabilities to take Visa, MasterCard, AmEx or PayPal.
In the meantime, if you need fancy rental drapery, take a good look at EventDrapery.com and call the 1-888-555-7555 number on their site for more information.
Our desire is to create worthwhile commercial projects with fresh points of view. If you know someone who might be interested in our content or services, please send them a link to artondisk.com so they can surf on over here! You can be a SuperAgent for change . . . Thank you! —Richard
