By the end of this chapter, you??™ll finally
have something dynamically generated on your web page. In Chapter 5, you??™ll finish building
the product catalog by adding support for categories, product lists, a product details page, and
more!
The main topics we??™ll cover in this chapter are
??? Analyzing the structure of the product catalog and the functionality it should support
??? Creating the database structures for the catalog and the data tier of the catalog
??? Implementing the business tier objects required to make the catalog run
??? Implementing a functional user interface for the product catalog
Showing Your Visitors What You??™ve Got
One of the essential features required in any e-store is to allow the visitor to easily browse through
the products. Just imagine what Amazon.com would be like without its excellent product catalog!
Whether your visitors are looking for something specific or just browsing, it??™s important to
make sure their experiences with your site are pleasant ones. After all, you want your visitors
to find what they are looking for as easily and painlessly as possible. This is why you??™ll want to
add search functionality to the site and also find a clever way of structuring products into categories
so they can be quickly and intuitively accessed.
Depending on the size of the store, it might be enough to group products under a number
of categories, but if there are a lot of products, you??™ll need to find even more ways to categorize
and structure the product catalog.
Pages:
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133