Advise on starting a web store site

[Matthew Croud]

Hi,

I'm going to start my first e commerce website for a small web shoe  
store.
I think I know enough PHP to keep my head above water, I'm using an  
add on shopping cart package to deal with the transactions.

My question is, what's the best way to design a site where each  
product appears to have its own page.

Is there a way to create the site *without* having each product have a  
physical separate page ?

Is there a method of web design which makes creating new pages simple  
if they all follow the same pattern. i.e thumbnail, description etc.

Thanks guys,

Matt.

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[Daniel Brown-5]

On Mon, Jul 6, 2009 at 08:15, Matthew Croud<matt@...> wrote:
[snip!]
>
> Is there a way to create the site *without* having each product have a
> physical separate page ?
>
> Is there a method of web design which makes creating new pages simple if
> they all follow the same pattern. i.e thumbnail, description etc.
[snip!]

    Sure, just check Google and look into doing includes, templating,
and using .htaccess with mod_rewrite - an Apache feature and module,
respectively, thus beyond the scope of PHP - to rewrite the URL's.
What this will do, essentially, is create a "prettier" URL, so
something like:

        http://www.example.com/path/to/cart.php?product_id=1234&group=987

    .... could become:

        http://www.example.com/p987/1234.html

    .... or really anything else that you'd like, depending on how you
write your scripts.  Again, though, the full creation of those is
really outside the scope of this list as well, but there are plenty of
open source scripts out there from which you can learn, modify, and
reuse free-of-charge for a commercial webstore.

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[Paul M Foster]

On Mon, Jul 06, 2009 at 01:15:10PM +0100, Matthew Croud wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I'm going to start my first e commerce website for a small web shoe
> store.
> I think I know enough PHP to keep my head above water, I'm using an
> add on shopping cart package to deal with the transactions.
>
> My question is, what's the best way to design a site where each
> product appears to have its own page.
>
> Is there a way to create the site *without* having each product have a
> physical separate page ?
>
> Is there a method of web design which makes creating new pages simple
> if they all follow the same pattern. i.e thumbnail, description etc.

Years ago, I used osCommerce for a site like this, and configured it to
present a page full of items in one category. This wasn't done through
PHP but through just configuring osCommerce. I'm not recommending
osCommerce per se (I think it's currently not well maintained), but it
stands to reason that other similar ecommerce suites would allow the
same capability.

Paul

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[tedd-2]

At 1:15 PM +0100 7/6/09, Matthew Croud wrote:

>Hi,
>
>I'm going to start my first e commerce website for a small web shoe store.
>I think I know enough PHP to keep my head above water, I'm using an
>add on shopping cart package to deal with the transactions.
>
>My question is, what's the best way to design a site where each
>product appears to have its own page.
>
>Is there a way to create the site *without* having each product have
>a physical separate page ?
>
>Is there a method of web design which makes creating new pages
>simple if they all follow the same pattern. i.e thumbnail,
>description etc.
>
>Thanks guys,
>
>Matt.

Mat:

Certainly, here's an example:

http://ancientstones.com/

Each item is pulled from a database and the catalog is assembled as
the user instructs. When the user clicks on an item, then an
individual page is assemble to show that item. There are no static
pages, but rather templates where the contents are pulled from a
database to fill the templates (catalog page and item page) as the
user shows interest.

I also have a back-end script that allow the owner to upload pictures
of his product and add content (i.e., title, description, price).

Additionally, the "shopping cart" I use here is provided by PayPal
and NOT something I installed. Believe me, dealing with credit card
transactions is not without concern and liability. I recommend with a
small web store, it is worth considering passing all that
responsibility off to a company that deals with it routinely. It's a
simple process to use PayPal.

Cheers,

tedd

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http://sperling.com  http://ancientstones.com  http://earthstones.com

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