brady.k — Wed, 07 Jun 2006 20:41:33 +0000

I would reccommend a database, for sure. MySQL and PHP preferred. Do you have any experience in coding at all?

Bkag — Wed, 07 Jun 2006 17:49:03 +0000

Well we plan on offering probably 40-50 products i think.

Green11 — Wed, 07 Jun 2006 06:33:42 +0000

A database is alot of work. If you have alot of products you definitely need one, and using MySQL with PHP will achieve this
However for a few products you can get away with static pages.

adjroth — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 20:25:33 +0000

with the few products on your page, you should not need a database to hold product information. unless you are planning on putting alot more on there.

brady.k — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 18:14:02 +0000

No, the coding has to be done by hand. It's not something that Frontpage can do for you.

Bkag — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 17:10:02 +0000

Well i hope i have got this sorted now, im going to use zen cart, but have to change host first because my current doesnt accept ftp. I am using msfrontpage to design my site, is there any way of doing what you are saying in the "design" view of frontpage?

adjroth — Tue, 06 Jun 2006 05:57:43 +0000

on my site http://www.jewelrysummit.com/ i have a main template, then smaller tables that are filled with data from a database using PHP, like brady said. I have an "Action" variable that defines what the customer is doing, "Page" variable to define what page they're on, and obviously a "Product" variable for what product they're viewing. You could use a paypal shopping cart, but i have one that i made but then uses paypal to checkout.

brady.k — Mon, 05 Jun 2006 20:50:56 +0000

You basically would want to use a template-based system and a language like PHP. A simple pseudo-code example:

index.php:

set page to index
include generic header file, and display first "half of webpage"
connect to table for index
pull data
display dynamic data
include generic footer file and display the remaining parts

And this would be the setup for each page, with a different "tag" for the page. If you want to get really fancy...you can have index.php accept variables, and have your entire webpage built around "index.php?id=1", "index.php?id=2" etc, but that's not really that good for SEO (from what I've heard).

Hopefully this helps.