Personalised Plates

Posted December 2nd, 2003 in Case Studies (Updated December 4th, 2008)

Personalised Plates sell personalised number plates in New Zealand, so you can add some interest to what is normally a boring registration number on your car.

The original Personalised Plates website was created by me, Chris Hope, while working at Webenz but after I left I continued to do work for them and we created a new version of the site in September 2004. I continue to work on their website and have also done some development on their internal system which uses Microsoft SQL Server 7 and Visual Basic 6. Most of the work on the Windows software is done by Sue Graham.

The website is coded using PHP with a MySQL database backend. On a daily basis update files are sent from the SQL Server database to update the online MySQL database with the plates that have been sold that day. The original search algorithms were written in Visual Basic and Transact-SQL and were ported to PHP so the searches could be run on the website as well.

Update December 4th 2008: We released a new version of the Personalised Plates website on December 3rd 2008, which is effectively the 4th version of the site. The screenshots below are from the 2nd version of the site.

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A new version of the website was released in September 2004. Most of the functionality remained the same but the code underneath was rebuilt from the ground up with a brand new design which brings the website in line with the current marketing material. Further development work was done in 2006 to enhance the ecommerce functionality and add real-time online credit card processing using DPS.

The Personalised Plates Website

Visitors to the website can search for available plates, browse categories of ideas and plates that other people have listed for resale. Once they have found a plate they are interested in, they can either send an enquiry for a sales representative to follow up or enter their credit card details and reserver the plate right there and then.

Successful Personalised Plates Search

Personalised Plates in New Zealand can have messages or pictures on the plates as well (a couple of examples of generated plates are shown below). If someone is interested in upgrading their plate to one with a message or picture they can do so online by playing around with the "Design My Plate" function which allows visitors to the site to design personalised plates online. This function uses a PHP image generator to create unique images on the fly each time the request is made with different pictures or captions. You can give it a go yourself by visiting the Personalised Plates website.

European Style Personalised Plate

New Zealand Picture Plate

Bottom Caption Message Plate

Visit the Personalised Plates website