Retail and Hospitality
Web stores slicker with Silverlight
22 January 2009
Cactus Commerce previewed a new Web store user interface (UI), built on Silverlight 2.0, at the NRF Big Show in New York. The demo uses a dummy music Web store called Soundshift to show the UI’s advanced functions including barcodes, vouchers and a wish list functionality, all of which can be sent from the site to a user’s mobile phone.
The solution is quick and inexpensive to implement thanks largely to its Silverlight foundation. Silverlight 2.0 is cross-platform and reduces the complexity of site creation dramatically, meaning that designers can run almost the whole development process. Cutting out the necessity to slice and move files around between developers and designers speeds the process and ensures that nothing is lost in translation between conception and the user experience.
“The great thing about this UI is its rich look and feel,” said Wanda Cadigan, director of marketing at Cactus Commerce. “It has all the traditional functionalities, but today retailers need to do more to engage the customer. In the past this would be quite expensive to achieve, but not with this new solution. It’s genuinely fun for the shopper to use and supports a truly multi-channel approach.”
Cactus Commerce also recently helped to create the new Tourism Montréal Web site as part of a multi-million dollar investment in promotion by Tourism Montreal. The Web site was built using Microsoft Ajax.NET technology, which enables advanced commands including drag-and-drop, dynamic selections, and user-friendly URLs.
“Cactus Commerce provided the technical expertise and implementation of the Tourism Montreal Web site. Our biggest challenge was to embrace creativity while integrating a technology developed for dynamic content management,” said Benoit Lavigne, general director of IT services at Cactus Commerce. “We also wanted to meet the users various behaviours while putting together two complete and different ways to discover the city: one, a full screen video mode focused on the experience, the second, more textual and information-oriented, at the same time allowing fluid movement between the modes from anywhere in the site.”
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