Mon, 07 Oct 2002

Metalsite: The redesign and SOAP Web Services API

I try to avoid talking about work here but I figured this is worth mentioning.

Bryan and I have been busy at work, bringing to fruition a lot of ideas that should have seen the light of day in the late 90's, but hindsight is 20/20. You see, we represent the remaining bastion of people who are still crazy enough to attempt to conquer B2B e-commerce, specifically B2B e-commerce in the metals industry. And it's not easy.

Building on a style labeled HTMinimalism by Curt Cloninger, we set out to radically simplify everything on the site, moving toward CSS-based layout and reducing average page size across the board. We deleted, edited, and cajoled some of the most hideous server parsed markup code that I have ever seen into a coherent whole that we believe has the potential to finally deliver on the promise of B2B e-commerce.

At the same time, we've built a SOAP web services API that enables our customers to transfer product data to our site using their own custom-designed SOAP clients, making it possible to create solutions that tightly integrate our customers disparate information systems with our own.

Check it out.

Posted at: 09:31 | permalink