Even after you??™ve completed your initial planned phases, things generally do not end
there. When planning a large software project, it??™s important to design in a way that makes
inevitable future growth easy. In Chapter 2, where we??™ll start dealing with the technical details
of building e-commerce sites, you??™ll learn how to design the web site architecture to allow for
long-term development flexibility.
If you??™re building sites for clients, they will like to keep their options open. Planning the
site, or any other software, in phases will help your clients feel comfortable doing business
with you. They will be able to see that you are getting the job done and can decide to end the
project at the end of any phase if they feel??”for whatever reason??”that they don??™t want to continue
to invest in development.
Phase I: Getting a Site Up
Chapters 2 through 11 concentrate on establishing the basic framework for the site and putting
a product catalog online. We??™ll start by putting together the basic site architecture and deciding
how the different parts of the application will work together. We??™ll then build the product catalog
into this architecture. You??™ll learn how to
??? Design a database for storing a product catalog containing departments, categories,
and products
??? Write the Structured Query Language (SQL) and Hypertext Preprocessor (PHP) code for
accessing that data and making the product catalog functional
??? Add data to the product catalog that defines product attributes, such as color and size
??? Provide a product search engine
??? Implement basic techniques to make your web site search engine friendly and reduce
URL link and redirect errors
??? Receive payments through PayPal Website Payments Standard
??? Give the site??™s administrators a private section of the site where they can administer the
catalog online
CHAPTER 1 ?– STARTING AN E-COMMERCE SITE 7
After you??™ve built this catalog, you??™ll see how to offer the products for sale by integrating it
with PayPal??™s shopping cart and order-processing system, which will handle credit card transactions
for you and e-mail you with details of orders.
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