Opportunity:

A website focusing on providing a branding platform for organizations based in United Kingdom. The site will display sales promotion and special offer schemes across various categories. The schemes will be in the form of limited number of online printable discount coupons available to registered site users.

The site will also provide the means to the organizations that wish to register with the site and promote their brands by maintaining coupons. The organizations will get a complete we based interface to create and manage their online coupons.

The execution and management of the complete site will also be handled through a separate and restricted web based interface.


Solution:

Three separate web-based modules were developed:

• Public Access Main Site – This module was the public face of the site, displaying the various offers for various brands spread across various categories, interests and locations. Extensive search options were provided for site users to narrow down their choice of offers. Simple user registration and login functionality was provided. Registered users were given the flexibility to print the selected coupons directly from the site, or bookmark them, by adding to their cart, for the future. A separate My Account Area was also provided for registered users, to manage their ‘profile’ and keep track of their ‘coupon history’.
  
  
• Merchant’s Extranet Area – This module was restricted area for the various organizations that were interested in promoting their brand through the site. The registered organizations were given the functionality to design, create and maintain their coupons through a restricted web based interface. The popularity of the coupons could also be tracked by viewing the history of the coupon prints taken by the registered site users.
  
  
• Site Administration Area - This module was a restricted web based interface for the COUPONUK Administrators to monitor the site registration and content. The Administrators were given the complete control on managing merchants and their coupons for display on the site. They also had complete control on the contents for display on site in the form of ad banners and FAQs. A newsletter module was also provided for easy creation and dispatch of bulk emails to registered users based on the ‘interest’ opted by them at the time of registration.

The online ‘Coupons’ print functionality was developed using the rich new features provided by Macromedia Flash MX.


Technology:

Platform - Windows 2000
Web Server - IIS
Database Server - SQL Server 2000
Web Development Tools - ASP, Java scripting and Flash MX.