We have been involved with the TI Web site since the early conceptual stages in mid-1994, through its launch in April, 1995 and through its expansion and redesign up to the present. Our goals for this site were to make it visually appealing but most important, to make it functional. TI's main audience is engineers looking for information on technical products. Our aim was to design the site to deliver that information in the most effective way we could devise. We get a lot of complements from site visitors and TI site has won a number of design and communication awards.

Rotating Images
A site's home page is usually the most frequently accessed page. That means two things: First, it is your best opportunity for capturing visitor attention and communicating new messages. Second, it must run efficiently. Instead of presenting visitors with a home page that is always the same, this design rotates through a series of large images. The most straightforward implementation of rotating images would have been to implement the home page as a script that is run every time it's accessed. But our approach is far more efficient with the same effect: a separate job runs every few minutes creating a new home page with different graphics. This way, the script is run hundreds or thousands of times less frequently than it might otherwise have been. The result is improved response for the overall site.

Electronic Commerce
Harry Tennant & Associates implemented a storefront for TI's retail sales activity although it has not yet appeared on the external Web site. It allows visitors to browse among product descriptions and price lists, select items to be added to a "shopping cart", review the contents of the cart and make purchases with credit cards or purchase orders in a secure environment.

The storefront and shopping cart are implemented without the need to maintain a database of shoppers and their cart selections on the server. This is desirable since the database could become quite large with "unfinished business." It also puts far less computational load on the server.

Discussion Groups
Texas Instruments needed moderated discussion groups available through their Web site on a variety of topics. Harry Tennant & Associates created a very flexible discussion group capability that will support all of TI's divisions and an unlimited number of subject area partitions within each division. The same discussion group system has been used internally by TI on their intranet. For more information, please visit http://www.htennant.com/hta/portfolio/portfolio.htm.

Career Mapper
Before the Web, Texas Instruments had distributed software called Career Mapper on diskettes to college students interested in employment at TI. The purpose of the software is to match up preferences and aptitudes with different kinds of careers based on answers to over two hundred questions. Students would go through the questions on the disketter, then send it back to TI for evaluation. We reimplemented Career Mapper on the Web for TI. It has increased the availability of the software to college students while dramatically cutting costs and simplifying the process.

This implementation presents users with questions a page at a time. It allows them to temporarily skip questions if they choose but requires that all questions are eventually answered. And, it does not require a TI to maintain a database of students and their questionaires that are not yet complete.

TI&ME
The TI&ME service helps Web site visitors save time by making new material on TI's huge Web site more accessible and more effective. Visitors can register and describe their interests related to TI's products and services.

Custom Web Page: When a registered visitor comes to the TI&ME pages, he gets a customized page featuring only what's new in his areas of interest.

Custom E-Mail: Registered visitors can also elect to be sent a weekly e-mail of things new on the site in the past week. Unlike Web pages, the custom e-mail messages deliver information to those who have asked for it without requiring any other action on their part. And the visitors have full control to stop the service any time they wish.

The TI&ME capability is one of the most popular areas of TI's Web site--evidence that visitors find it useful. Tens of thousands of TI&ME e-mail messages are automatically generated and delivered every week.