Bill Levkoff

Bill Levkoff is a New York bridesmaid dress maker with more than sixty years in the business, a family company that opened its first showroom on Broadway in the 1950s and sells through a nationwide network of authorized retailers. Its dresses have appeared in Brides, Bridal Guide, InStyle Wedding and Modern Bride.

Data Subsystems built the company's website, live since December 2010: an online catalogue of bridesmaid, flower girl and junior bridesmaid dresses where a bride can try every style in every color before visiting a store. The centrepiece was a coloring technology that recolors any dress automatically and previews the tones in high resolution, including two-tone combinations with a separate sash color.

The archive dates the switch to a single day. On 22 December 2010 billlevkoff.com is still the old Flash site - a three-kilobyte page built on swfobject and swfaddress, with nothing for a search engine to read. The snapshot of 23 December 2010 is the new one: a catalogue served from /static/billlevkoff, with readable URLs for every style, lazy-loaded imagery and a page a crawler can index. The features the April 2012 press release describes - recoloring a dress and its sash, favorites, similar dresses - came later, on a site that had been running for over a year by then.

Around the catalogue sat the tools that move a bride from browsing to buying: favorites saved with a heart icon, Similar Dresses suggestions, zoom and enlarged views, sharing with the bridal party, search by style number and a store locator that lists nearby retailers by zip code and distance. Dress images were delivered from a major content delivery network so pages loaded quickly from any location. The site ran in this form until about 2016.