M P Retail is a startup website aiming to sell Irish style worldwide. This works in theory because the Irish are a particularly dispersed nation, so there are Irish descendents all over the world. Modern Ireland is now prosperous and upbeat and even more of a magnet than it ever was.
This is an example of a site that was developed quickly and to a tight budget. The client had £600 to spend. They provided the photographs, some of the text, their own merchant account, and a site created using, I think, a Yahoo site creator. The site didn't work and was a real mess to tidy up, automatic tools use a lot of tables to achieve their layouts which make them really difficult to sort out by hand. My hand crafted site was about a third the size, and the client noticed it displayed faster. The site was originally designed around the winter/spring collection, but amendments were easily made to my simplified pages.
Clearly for the budget it lacks some of the sophistication of, for instance www.tinshop.co.uk or myKitchen.uk.com, but it does cover the basics. The site is pleasant to look at, easy and straightforward to use, and you can buy single items by credit card. I also removed some of the superfluous pages in the original site design to make it easier to use. It's rather limited too in that all the data is held in the html page or back-end software rather than in a database. Making the site database-driven would make it possible for the client to maintain their own photographs and ranges, but would add several thousands of pounds to the development cost.
One of the things I like about it is that I've used colours that complement the range. These colours will change for each season's clothes to reflect the season's colours. This is easily accomplished using stylesheets.
I also like the easy way the pictures change as you click the thumbnails. It's actually done by software at the back end (running on the web server, rather than on your computer), in other words, the whole page is reloaded with a new pic, but to the user it looks like just the pic changes. The advantage of using back-end processing is it'll work on any machine (it doesn't require a JavaScript-capable browser or JavaScript to be enabled). Also, the way I've passed the request to the back-end software enables the user to cut and paste the page link and pass it successfully to a friend, and it means every product page is findable by a search engine.
The site was completed in about six weeks. The client said "everyone loves the front page, clean, quick, sharp", "I do like working with you, such a sensible approach to business", and "this is a very very nice site, I think you should be proud of it".