We won a contract in March 2007 with First Class Conferences, located near Charleston, South Carolina, to develop an online conference registration application. Holly Bartholomew, the owner of First Class Conferences, has been in the event planning industry for approximately 20 years. Being new to the industry, the design process was a challenge for us. The PHP-based Web application was meant to replace an existing client-side relational database application. Our goal was to design, develop, and deploy a solution in order to satisfy her largest client. She just completed her second year of the conference. Although there were some challenges getting through the first year, we successfully built an application that is full-featured, easily accessible, and allows our customer to manage several conferences.

The application was required to be flexible, relatively fast, and have the ability to manage multiple conferences at one time. In addition, online registrations require online payments. Therefore, we had to integrate with a payment gateway. After a few design iterations, the application now handles approximately six large conferences throughout the year. Some of the capabilities are dynamically generated PDF-based badges, summary reporting for each conference, custom event options, including conferences sessions and workshops, meal choices, and invoice functions.

Within the next year, we hope to launch a new version of the application, one that is Java-based, with more robust features. This will allow us to more easily manage large transactional volumes and give First Class Conferences, as well as other customers, a better and more efficient way to manage events.