YC London is a unique family run business specialised in professional handcrafted pieces of jewelry for both individuals and celebrates.

When I was invited to a meeting at YC London store I was a bit nervous and wast too sure what to expect. When I got there, I met with Mark the store manager, he was very down to earth and his sense of homer made it easy to communicate and relate to. He introduced me to The owner and his ex-wife who is also very involved in day to day running of the business. spoke about plants for their business and what they wanted me to do form them. As this was my early days of becoming an HTML web designer and was still on the learning stage.  I made it clear to them I was more experienced in flash website and that if I was going to make a website it will only be for promotion purpose, not an eCommerce website. 

And so we agreed, and I began working on the new flash website for them. At first, I helped them to register a domain name with a third party hosting company called E-noise. Creating the flash website took a bit of work, as I had to do a lot of animating to give each page transition effects each time a page loaded. Also, because we wanted to add a gallery to the website, this took a lot more time. First I had to wait for the owner’s ex-wife to take the photos of each product as she was a photographer, then I was given the files for me to crop prepare for the website. There were thousands of images and it took ages for me to prepare and sort them all. Due to the scale of products they had and wanted to be added to the website, I decided to make the gallery load externally using XML so that products can be organised in categories and be updated easily on the server without having to recreate or publish the website each time they wanted an update. And so after the few weeks, the website was ready. I uploaded it to the server and tested it and everyone was happy.

Soon after the launch of the website, I was also given the task to create flyers to promote some of the campaigns and deals they had going during the busy season. 

After a year passed, and when smartphones were becoming widely available, I was called back for another meeting, to discuss the who we can make the website be available for phone users. Due to the fact that flash player was not available on mobile phone browser we were forced to drop the flash website and start working on a new HTML website. So it started doing more research on HTML and CSS until I was confident to create a new website capable of showing on the mobile phone browsers. The new site had only the most popular products they wanted to showcase. Following a few months, I learned about PayPal and started integrated the BuyNow button on to the website. 

Summary

Looking back now I have to admit, if it wasn’t for the flash software I would not become a web designer. I was very saddened to see flash replaced in the web industry. Flash was the reason I started learning how to animate and program and create interactive applications. It the only program that I knew which allowed me to draw graphics, animate them and program them to respond to actions.

Overall working with YC London was astounding, they help me to push myself outside my comfort zone, to learn new things which have a great benefit to me today. I see a great future for YC London, I only look forward to doing more business with them in the future.