Book Image

Building Online Stores with osCommerce: Professional Edition

By : David Mercer
Book Image

Building Online Stores with osCommerce: Professional Edition

By: David Mercer

Overview of this book

<p>The book can be read from front to back, but each chapter is self contained so the reader can skip chapters to read those that they are interested in. Each chapter will move from basic to advanced where applicable and also relate what the administrator (reader) is doing to how this affects what the client sees on the site.</p> <p>So, for example, the customization chapter will start off with a discussion on the concept of design and how to relate this to your business. Once the reader has a clear idea of what they need to do, we look at some really simple changes such as modifying the site's language, before moving to some advanced modifications which may involve some PHP programming. At the same time the discussion will demonstrate how the changes made affect the site.</p> <p>Throughout the book, much consideration is given to the "right" way to doing things. Readers will have the great advantage that they begin, from the very start, doing things properly. This will save them a lot of time and effort in the years to come as they build on and modify their site. Utilizing best practices and sound methodologies is a great asset for beginners and experienced users alike.</p> <p>At all times, the coverage given in this book pays homage to the fact that, ultimately, the reader has a business goal in mind. To this end, the material never gets bogged down in technical issues or long discourses, but rather focuses on what is practically important for the online business and then moves on. To complement this, there are plenty of suggestions and hints as to how and where to look for further information.</p>
Table of Contents (19 chapters)
Building Online Stores with osCommerce: Professional Edition
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewers
Foreword
Introduction
Index

Maintenance


You may be forgiven for thinking that your shiny new website is now done and dusted, and that you simply need to keep it filled up with new products in order for it to keep going forever. Well, it will certainly go for some time like this, but what you really need to do is keep on top of maintenance chores right from the start, in order to keep your site uncluttered, efficient, and neat. Doing this will make working with your site a far more pleasant and efficient process as time goes by. But what are the actual goals of a maintenance plan?

Fundamentally, your maintenance-based goals must relate to the fact that you want to keep your store as up to date and relevant for your customers as possible. A secondary requirement of your maintenance plan is to keep the site well-ordered behind the scenes so that the administration process is kept effective and efficient. From this we can derive a kind of three-pronged attack on the system's entropy, which can be summed up with the following...