Project Title: Webposition.com Period: March 1998 through March 2000. Continuing support. Client: FirstPlace Software, Inc. Complexity: 40 Perl scripts, 1500 lines. Technology: Apache Web Server

Perl 5.0 Summary: FirstPlace Software, Inc. sells an application for monitoring and

managing a customers website ranking on major search engines. Code Gurus originally developed the application in 1996 and maintained it through 1998. The application is still being maintained. A website was built to provide on-line sales of the application as well as track downloads of the free sample version and track affiliate sales. Through the affiliate system third party websites that send customers to the Webposition.com site get a portion of the sales from that customer. It is a very successful system for marketing, but it requires careful management of referring information. The on-line system for tracking sales relies heavily on cookies and other tokens that are given to the customer when they first download a trial version in order to track them to the final sale. The system doesn’t use any databases, instead it saves the data to a variety of encrypted text files that are downloaded periodically to the FirstPlace network through an automated process. Many of the pages that are generated through the system are built from templates and customized for each user. The checkout process has a number of different paths depending on the customers referral information, the options that they chose to purchase and how they plan on paying. Code Gurus was the sole developer for the application and support tools. Graphical design was performed by FirstPlace’s designers.

URLs: http://www.webposition.com/ Reference: Brent Winters

407-240-5114 brent@firstplacesoftware.com

Figure 1 - Front Page

Figure 2 - Trial Download Page

Figure 3 - Purchase Page (Partial)

Figure 4 - Error Page