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... Over a two year period, the folks at Hypersite consistently produced high quality IT solutions to support the web-enabled training application...
- D. Hefter

Starwood Golf Vacations

Starwood has an image of luxury and refined elegance. They wanted to put together a golf portal that focused on the “golf traveler” and present information on the properties that had golf courses on or around them, while still maintaining their image of refined elegance. The data assets, however, were not equally refined. Starwood wanted to put together a portal type of site from some of their in-house assets, multiple 3rd party databases (which just so happened to be different DB products on different platforms, in geographically disbursed locations), feed leads and quote requests to a call center with access to real-time rates and tee-times.

Hypersite had to figure out how to pull hotel information from one database in one place.. then look in another place and find out what courses were on that property, around that property (but not from competing entities), get images and golf course info from another database… and pull it all into a server we hosted and maintained for them… which coincidentally was on yet another platform… and figure out some way to admin the data

  These all had to be seamless, look and feel similar to other Starwood branded marketing efforts, and have the flexibility to adapt as their ideas changed.

No problem.

Goals

The goal was to pull assets from multiple sources and put together a seamless website experience that made viewers want to book a Starwood Golf Vacation by creating a simple, easy to navigate, image rich website that encouraged them to "book it now".

Challenges

  • Data all over the place in no common format.
  • Defined presentation method.... Images of all sizes and shapes.
  • Missing data.
  • Rapidly changing priorities and marketing efforts.
  • Seamless user experience.
  • Time constraints.

Tools Used

SQL Server 7
Macromedia Dreamweaver UltraDev 4
The .NET Framework
Visual Studio .NET 2003
Macromedia Homesite 4.5
Macromedia Fireworks 4
Adobe Photoshop

Methods

Many different standards for retrieving the heterogenous data had to be employed. SQL differed from platform to platform, so dynamic statements had to be constructed in order for everything to work smoothly. ASP was the primary method for displaying the dynamic content from the web server.