GREAT Frontier Web Site for April 13, 1998 SpeedServe Inc. Frontier allows a few of us to tackle a job that would be far too large to accomplish otherwise.

Tiger Summers describes the projects:
SpeedServe Inc. is an online retailer that has an inventory of over 4 million products. At the moment we operate two websites http://www.videoserve.com and http://www.bookserve.com. In addition to these sites, gameserve.com is slated for release soon.

When I came to SpeedServe, I inherited code that was created either by hand or by Microsoft FrontPage. Thus there was a great amalgam of code that was very dissimilar. It soon became clear that Frontier was the best tool to solve our problems. Our Website is powered by an IBM OS/390 system, therefore all cgi's and scripts are run in on the IBM box. Thus, our use of Frontier is more organizational. I began using Frontier to clean up and organize the sites by creating page templates from which all the pages are rendered. There are three template styles that I use for VideoServe.com and two for BookServe.com.

For example, our most recent promotion involved a deal with Oscar.com whereby VideoServe.com was the exclusive online store for the Oscar.com website. This promotion included over 70 pages of html, one for each year of the Oscars. After we did the research for all the necessary data, e.g. Best Picture, Director, etc. for 70 years, I rendered these pages in about a minute and we were live. This obviously was quite a time saver, and makes a big difference in the size of projects we can take on.

With the advent of the ContentServer for Frontier 5.0, I am anticipating a new level of productivity. As a fairly small group, Frontier allows a few of us to tackle a job that would be far too large to accomplish otherwise. Hats off to Dave Winer and the staff at UserLand for providing a tool that allows us to quickly realize our goals.