Anyone can create an e-commerce site. Really, there are so many books, trainings, sites and articles available on e-commerce many with free designs and free code that a diligent developer could cuddle together a working site within a day or so. It might not be exactly what your client needs but it would be close enough to work most of the time and many e-commerce sites are built this way. For some business applications, this is a perfectly acceptable way of building a site not every e-commerce site has to have special features or fancy product displays or multi layered check out. In fact, some of the most effective sites are extremely simple just presenting the products and giving visitors an easy way to buy them. For our purposes, we are going to go a little deeper into the structure of e-commerce and the process of creating an e-commerce site for your client. This course will not build an entire e-commerce site. There are only a limited number of code files that go along with this training. When we look at the development of this site, there will be examples of files for an administrative area and for a shopping cart but not for the other supporting pages of an e-commerce site. This course will use ColdFusion MX for the application server language. So you will need either a local developer’s copy of ColdFusion MX or access to a hosted version. A developer’s copy of ColdFusion can be downloaded from macromedia.com. This version is a trial version for 30 days and then will convert automatically to a developer’s version. Only one IP address may access this version. ColdFusion MX runs on multiple platforms so your choice of web server depends on what you have access to. For this course, ColdFusion will run locally on Windows XP Pro with IIS installed. Many web hosting companies offers CF MX on Unix or Linux platform with the apache web server and that will work fine as well. Sequel Server 2000 is the database that will be used with this training so you will need either a local copy of Sequel Server 2000 or Enterprise Manager with access to a shared version. A good Html CSS Editor is a must for this course. We will be using TopStyle Pro written by Nick Bradbury who also wrote the HomeSite Html Editor that was purchased by macromedia. A trial version of HomeSite is available at www.bradsoft.com. My recommendation is to purchase the full version. It’s well worth the investment. Other options are Dreamweaver MX from macromedia and Adobe GoLive. Both of which are very good vis-à-vis web site editors. For the design section of the course, we will be using Photoshop to create layouts and client comps. You can use any illustration or artwork program you are comfortable with. Internet Explorer is the default browser for many, many customers. So we will build our site for IE 6.0 or higher. However, Firefox is rapidly becoming a widely used browser. So we will make sure our site also looks good and works well in firefox. Firefox can be downloaded for free from www.mozilla.org. Again, this course won’t supply you with pre-built code files that you can just copy and paste to create a new e-commerce site. You can find those files anywhere. What you will get from this training is a good understanding of how e-commerce works, what it should look like and how to make successful choices when you are building sites for your client.
Course: | Introduction to E-Commerce |
Author: | Darcey Spears |
SKU: | 33628 |
ISBN: | 1-932808-79-5 |
Release Date: | 2005-08-25 |
Duration: | 7.5 hrs / 102 lessons |
Work Files: |
Yes |
Captions: | No |
Compatibility: |
Vista/XP/2000, OS X, Linux QuickTime 7, Flash 8 |