Determining the structure of the catalog is one of the first tasks to accomplish in this chapter.
Keep in mind that, in a professional approach, these details would have been established before
starting to code when building the requirements document for the project. However, for the
purposes of this book, we prefer to deal with things one at a time.
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After the structure of the catalog is established, you??™ll start writing the code that makes
the catalog work as planned.
What Does a Product Catalog Look Like?
Today??™s web surfers are more demanding than they used to be. They expect to find information
quickly on whatever product or service they have in mind, and if they don??™t find it, they
are likely to go to the competition before giving the site a second chance. Of course, you don??™t
want this to happen to your visitors, so you need to structure the catalog to make it as intuitive
and helpful as possible.
Because the e-store will start with around 100 products and will probably have many
more in the future, it??™s not enough to just group them in categories. The store also has a number
of departments, and each department will contain a number of categories. Each category
can then have any number of products attached to it.
?– Note Later in the book, you??™ll also create the administrative part of the web site, often referred to as the
control panel, which allows the client to update department, category, and product data.
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