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What Dreamweaver MX can do for your e-shop
It is a famous saying among web mongers that “it is either e-business or out of business.” In this Information Age, almost every aspect of our life is getting hooked up with technology bringing world communities into one global e-society. One of the wonders of the information society is the rapid progress at which the world commerce is growing online. This has paved new opportunities for all businesses, big and small to join the online bandwagon.
Web experts have divided requirements of e-business into following four categories:
— Online store
— Online payment market
— Customer support
— Successful e-marketing
What are e-shops?
E-shop or online store is a business based website which allow online visitors (customers) to find, select and buy goods from the provided catalogue. Some of the successful online stores are Amazon, MSN shop, sybex.com, e-bay, etc.
In order to market one’s products, anyone can develop an e-shop and make his or her presence felt online regardless of the nature and size of one’s business. All one has to do is to follow a simple set of instructions using the powers of Macromedia Dreamweaver MX (DMX).
Basic requirements
Before you go on the course to develop your own website, you need to install Macromedia Dreamweaver MX.
DMX as a development tool helps you to easily manage and update their websites. For this reason it is necessary to create a “root folder” on any desired partition of the hard disk. This folder is used to accommodate your website files, such as HTML pages, images, sound files, documents, etc. Also maintaining one root folder would allow you to easily keep track of broken links and uploads.
Next step that you have to perform is to define your website by following the instructions given below:
• Start the DMX application.
• Click on “Define Site,” in the Column Site.
• In the “Site Definition” dialogue box that appears on the screen, choose the “Basic” tab and provide information, such as name of your site, for instance, “Online Bookstore,” and also define how the DMX will correspond with your web space.
• The Advanced tab requires you to provide details pertaining to layout of your site by specifying file name, file size, etc.
• After you have defined all parametres, click OK for information to materialize. This stored details can be edited at point in time.
What images do?
A website looks drab if it lacks lively images. For an impressive e-store the importance of images is doubled because of two reasons: firstly, the logo of company, in a image form, works as an identity for any company. Secondly, the images enhance customers understanding of products and helps marketing brands in a better way.
As a web designer you should also consider quality of images used. Therefore, it is recommended to use at Jpegs images done in 72dpi (dots per seconds). Because DMX includes all the features of a typical site editor, it makes the task of insertion of images very easy. It just require you to point to the area on the page where you want the image to appear and create a picture box which is found in the tool bar. When you click image icon, it will open a dialogue box “Place Image Source.” Just select the image file of the product or logo from the root folder. In case the image file (or any file) is outside the root folder then DMX will prompt you to copy the file into it. In such cases click OK to proceed.
There are also other important elements that are associated wtih images, such as its width, height, alignment, link, etc. These have to be correctly defined in the pages of the site to give it a professional look. These attributes can be defined from the menu given below the Site Window.
Fashioning catalogues
An e-shop is not complete if it is missing a list of existing items, available for ordering, called catalogue. To develop a catalogue, listing computer related titles, for an online book store, there are two easy ways:
Using Microsoft Excel: When the database is of limited size, Microsoft Excel can be a handy tool to use, which allows to import data from the spreadsheet.
This procedure requires to make a list of items in Microsoft Excel and save it in “.txt” format. Excel, as flat file database, also provides an option of saving the file in tabular form. You can easily integrate this file into your webpages using DMX. By just going to the file menu of DMX, and pointing the cursor to Import, you will find a list of options. Here, choose tabular data, which will bring up a dialogue box showing the catalogue file. Clicking OK will show the data in a catalogue format. It is interesting that this data can be customized using properties inspector.
Using table: There are number of ways to set table using its related tools to create a catalogue. One of the ways is to click on table icon from the insert menu, and select number of rows and column from the dialogue box. Add data on each row of table and click on hyperlink to add link to the catalogue. This link will take the surfer to the description of the desired product.
A clear description helps a buyer to select the product. The linked file includes the title of the book, Name of the author and price.
Adding frames: Frames are added to the site to give each category a prominent style. For this purpose select the type of the frame from the Insert bar. DMX provides your site a unique style by means of different frame techniques, such as left, right, top and bottom frames, can turn the plain document into a eye catching web page. Once proficiency is achieved in creating sites, you can easily decorate the site with bottom and nested left frame, or top and bottom frame styles.
Adding contact: Email icon on insert bar is reserved for making email link. Since email link is a server-side code, you need to specify testing server category in site definition dialog box.
Adding form: Form makes a website interactive which is desired by most customers so that they could drop their feedback or post request for desired product. To add a form click on the form icon in Site Window of DMX. In order to add client-side script, such as JavaScript function to process the form; and to add relative buttons (Submit, Reset), the Behavior icon is used to add the required function. JavaScript can also be added simply by opening code window.
Adding jump menu: This is an extraordinary feature of the Dreamweaver MX. It feature can be added as a Site Index in your website by following these steps:
— Click on Jump menu icon, which will show dialogue box. Insert text of the catalogue items on the text box.
— Click on + button to add this item on menu item.
— Click “When selected go to URL” box to add link to the item. When a visitor clicks on the item, the full description of the item will appear on the screen.
— Add “Go to” button option, this will create an index of catalogue on the Site Window.
Designing templates
If you are short of time, and want your site up and running in no time, DMX provides with pre designed layouts. For creating online stores there are five types of layouts. Following is the description of one such layout.
Commerce: product catalogue: At the top of the page a table is introduced. This table can be divided into rows and columns. Other changes in table’s font, size, and link can be made from property inspector dialogue box. To place an image of 100 width and height a place is reserved at the left side of the page. Product’s details can be given in the middle of the page. While at the bottom there are two tables placed side by side. First table comprises of numbers from 1 to 5. The other table encloses with “previous” and “next captions”. To create links select any number or previous or next caption. Give the destination of the file to be linked in the link box of the property inspector.
Dreamweaver MX is loaded with numerous features, of which we have just discussed a basic few ones. The purpose of this article is to give you overview of capabilities of this software and make you realize the wonders that it can perform for you. By learning some of these features you will be able to develop an online shop of your own and make your presence felt on the web.
The writer
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