CASE STUDY: LL Bean Park Searchsm
Since 1998
The Park Search pages at LL Bean were begun under a predecessor. The project uses a Microsoft Access database and a Visual Basic program to maintain park data and to output HTML pages for each park and its images and maps. Since parks are only updated once a year, dynamic, database-driven pages were not desired. So each year, an editor updates the database and we output new pages. But in the Visual Basic program, EON Webware optimized the queries to cut processing time from 4 hours to 7 minutes. In addition, the HTML pages now use CSS styles, though they've not been updated yet for full standards compliance.
The Park Search home page appears at right. Available for LL Bean customers all over the world.
Though we didn't write the search algorithm, our data drives the results. Here, we searched for Canadian parks with snowshoeing available. (We would recommend reiterating the search terms at the top of the results page.)
The Park Detail page. The Visual Basic program queries the Access database and writes thousands of files, for park details, image closeups, and locator maps.
A large collection of park activity and amenity fields in the database feeds information to the Activities Checklist and, more importantly, to the Search Results. Visitors see all available activities by scrolling to the bottom of the Park Detail page.
Image pages provide a better view of the photographs provided by the park superintendents/managers. EON Webware will edit photos as necessary. First, using Photoshop, we clean up any bad cropping or other image quality problems such as brightness, focus, or scratches, then we batch process for uniform widths and heights and once more for the smaller "thumbnail" size that appears on the main Park page.