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As we're all familiar with these days, websites
consist of a number of pages, and we use some kind of navigation
device (e.g. a toolbar) to find the page we're looking for. If your
company has 500 products then, it would be logical for the website
to have one page per product, or maybe one page per group of products.
It would be possible to build all of these pages as separate items,
in fact this is exactly how it has to be done when you're preparing
a paper catalogue for the printing press. But modern website construction
techniques allow for a very much more sophisticated approach.
Unless your company has fewer than 10 or
20 products, you probably have some kind of database containing
a list of your products, together with various other properties
these products have, such as sale price, weight and so on. This
could be something as simple as a formatted price list in Excel,
or maybe a more complex searchable database in something like Microsoft
Access or Filemaker. An increasingly popular website construction
technique involves taking this data directly for use on the web
site. Such a website can be broken down into the following modules:
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The Data
Using an example of a wine merchant, you might have 100 different
wines for sale. Your database might contain fields such as cost
per bottle, country of origin, colour of wine, year of production.
But you might also want to introduce categories of wine. This
is something which you may already do, but might be a good idea
to introduce for the website purposes, even if you don't already
divide up your product range. Given 10 categories with 10 wines
in each, the website will be much easier to navigate and to
find a specific wine in a short time. You may also want to put
in fields for your internal product codes, and other fields
which need not be shown to the website visitor, such as trade
price and supplier name. Why? Well if your shipping department
receives an order and the goods are out of stock, they know
who to contact to order it, or you could have the emailed order
display the profit margin on each order on delivery to your
orders department.
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Page Templates
Rather than construct separate pages for each product, a web
site template will be a graphical layout description which
defines where all the fields should appear and in what format.
For instance, the year might appear in plain text underneath
the wine name, whereas the colour might appear in larger bold
text, displayed in the colour of the wine.
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Database
to web page scripting engine
This is where the Room101 expertise comes into play. Our programmed
scripts will allow any product to be displayed using the template
file or files, thus permitting small changes in the single template
file to immediately affect all displayed products on the site.
The mechanism usually provided to get from page to page is some
kind of browse, perhaps selecting a letter from A-Z index, or
listing in order of price or in order of age.
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Search Engine
Optionally, this module can be used to allow website visitors
to quickly find products based on given criteria. This facility
becomes more and more useful the larger the number of products
on the site. For instance, your wine customer might be looking
for a wine from Chile, bottled between 1995 and 1997, costing
under £19 per bottle, with the results sorted in order of
ascending cost.
Unlike the generic search engines
found elsewhere on the internet, which are rapidly becoming
increasingly blunt instruments, each Room101 search engine
is written specifically for the site in question. So if you're
selling second hand cars instead of wines, the country of
origin would not be necessary, whereas the engine size may
well be. The aim of a search engine is to always try to return
a sensible number of results. If you're searching for a wine,
you might wish to be offered a selection of about 5 or 10
which match your search parameters. Returning 100 results
(or none) would mean that the customer hasn't really been
helped much with their search. For this reason, the total
number of products on your site needs to be taken into consideration
when constructing the search engine. In fact we probably wouldn't
recommend a search engine at all if your site has less than
about 50 products.
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