Joe Hussar — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 17:17:52 +0000

Thanks -have a great day!

Megan — Fri, 27 Jul 2007 15:51:15 +0000

I don't have any direct experience with eCommerce myself so it's hard to make a specific recommendation. Jeevesbond has done some work with OS Commerce and I think the latest version is pretty good. Try looking around in our Online Business and eCommerce forum - this question has come up there many times before. Or you can post your own topic there and might get some answers from people who actually know about eCommerce!

web site size

Joe Hussar — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 16:37:43 +0000

mmmmmmmmmmmm that's food for thought

I have a shopping cart (from dansie.net) - but when you say:

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You really should be using some sort of an e-commerce system that could manage all of this for you rather than having hard-coded pages for every product. 5 minutes per page with 1000 pages ??? That works out to 83 hours! Sounds like a lot of time when you could be installing a shopping cart system and saving yourself a lot of headaches down the road.
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It sounds like a lot more than what I have. Can you give me a supplier name or two who do what you suggest?

thanks again...........

Megan — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 16:27:54 +0000

Do you mean sub domain? I'm not sure what a "sub-web" is.

Google may still have issues with indexing two verisons of the same content. You may still have issues keeping two versions of that many pages up-to-date. It doesn't matter if the pages are on a separate subdomain or not.

Quote: In other words if someone sees an item I'm offering on Google and clicks they will land on the item page. They could then buy the item on that page - or click links to go to any other section of the "main site". There won't be any links on an individual page that sends anyone to another individual page ............... only to my main site.

So then they get back to your main site and find the same product listed there in a different way. To add to that, they aren't sure how to find the previous page that they were on, because it's no longer in the navigation scheme. Confusing.

You really should be using some sort of an e-commerce system that could manage all of this for you rather than having hard-coded pages for every product. 5 minutes per page with 1000 pages ??? That works out to 83 hours! Sounds like a lot of time when you could be installing a shopping cart system and saving yourself a lot of headaches down the road.

web site size.....

Joe Hussar — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 16:20:15 +0000

That's a good point. The way I planned to work around it was to have all of the individual product pages in a separate sub-web. There won't be any link from my main site to the sub web which contains the individual pagfes for each item.

The sub-web would only be accessible via links from Google Base. In other words if someone sees an item I'm offering on Google and clicks they will land on the item page. They could then buy the item on that page - or click links to go to any other section of the "main site". There won't be any links on an individual page that sends anyone to another individual page ............... only to my main site.

This way I hope to get google-base exposure/traffic and integrate it with my site too.

Re: individual creation of pages - I'm using dynamic web templates I created in Front Page - one for each "family" of products. Then all I have to do is to copy the template to a new page - change the image, part number & product title in the shopping cart and save it. Once I am organized it's about 4 or 5 minutes a page...........

That sound OK? I suspect there's probablty a neat global way to do it with a database and tables in some way - but that stuff is over my head.......

Megan — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 14:34:32 +0000

One thing I would worry about is having the same content duplicated on too many pages. This causes headaches for a bunch of reasons - you have to make sure all the content is updated properly, the search engine has to decide which page they should index, and users could be confused about seeing the same content in more than one place. The best thing to do would be to redesign the whole site so that the new google friendly single product pages are part of the main site.

pr0gr4mm3r — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 14:21:14 +0000

You're not going to be creating all these pages manually, are you?