Web Design Examples - James Thin

James Thin were the largest booksellers in Scotland and Bill worked for them in various roles for 21 years until they went into administration in 2002. In 1995 he initiated their first website and built it from scratch. The site developed quickly and an ordering service was set up using the 80,000 item stock file of the main bookshop. This proved sufficiently popular that it was decided to set up a secure online ordering system incorporating the complete Books in Print database which contained 1.2 million titles. This operated successfully for a number of years attracting customers from all over the world and was often compared favourably with the much more expensive systems of companies such as Amazon.

Visually the site went through a number of redesigns - it's hard to remember now just how basic the features of the web were in 1995!!

There were over 600 pages by the end and a number of different styles were included within the overall feel to suit the differences between such diverse subjects as Children's books, Science Fiction, Scottish History, or Academic textbooks.

There was a monthly literary magazine feature, three different newsletters were sent out to subscribers interested in new titles, and there were 116 pages devoted to individual authors in a wide variety of genres. Scottish ones included Dorothy Dunnett, Nigel Tranter, Ian Rankin and Iain Banks, who were always amongst the most popular pages, while the SF pages had 68 featured authors.

Sadly the site was closed after the company went into administration, ending 152 years of business.