Suphi Furs is a family owned business that has been owned and operated since 1975
and sells both the latest fashions in furs, shearlings and leather, as well as providing
custom design work and a wide range of services from repairs, relining, restyling,
cleaning, glazing and cold storage. As a business based on a highly "visual" product,
it was important that the site looked great and that it's pictures were high quality,
presented in a user friendly manner, and told the story of both the quality of goods
on sale and the various services Suphi Furs provides.
Meetings were held with the client to explore design direction, desired look and
feel, colors to use, etc and then a photo shoot was arranged in order to capture
high quality product photos and portraiture. AJAX (shorthand for Asynchronous JavaScript
and XML), a web development technique for creating interactive web applications,
was used in this project on all secondary pages. The intent of using AJAX is to
make web pages feel more responsive by exchanging small amounts of data with the
server behind the scenes, so that the entire web page does not have to be reloaded
each time the user makes a change. This is meant to increase the web page's interactivity,
speed, and usability, and was implemented specifically with the site's pictures.
If the site visitor clicks on the product images on the home page, they are taken
to Suphi's "collection page". There are expandable categories in the left-hand column
("Furs", "Leathers", "Handbags", etc) and scrolling images in the right-hand column
(the default being the "Furs" images). Clicking on any of the categories will cause
the slideshow to present products of that category type without the screen refreshing.