Intranet Bidding

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A company I was working for wanted to give out some memorabilia to its staff. As there was more staff than items they decided to let people bid small amounts of money and raise funds for the chartity the business had adopted.

The specification at the beginning was:

• Easy to use and fits the current Intranet design.
• £1 bids only.
• Bidders could not be seen.
• Certain staff had basic administration tools.

A certain, rather famous, online bidding site was mentioned as the foundation for their bidding site. I had to point out for the time I was given I would not be able to create such a complicated site.

As the site already had an intranet I followed that design pattern.

At first I went with a basic list of items and a button to place a £1 bid. Once a bid had been made the next click would increment by a pound. As the site was a local one I was able to use staff's usernames to register who had bidded

Administration

A basic form allowed the administrators to add a description, location and photogragh. These members of staff were also allowed to carry out the following tasks:

• View Bidding History.
• Remove Last Bid.
• Mark Item As Sold.
• Delete Item.

I coded this feature with simple links which were only visable to administrators:

Development

Once the site had been up for a week the company asked for a change to the way people could bid. They said that people should be allowed to bid any amount rather than limiting it to £1 increments.