Toiling....

Okay now that I am in the middle of it, maybe this new shopping cart thing wasnt such a good idea. Well no, I know it is a good idea it is just a colossal pain in the neck to get set up right. Sigh.

First off, I have close to 10,000 products. I cleaned them up in excel and access and have them uploaded into the back office. Back office created a csv file and we uploaded that into the shopping cart. Not quite that easy really - what I said in just a few sentences was a colossal job all by itself, getting things cleaned up, set up right, and working. Im proud of the results, but the hours were definitely there.

I tried to automate the pages part, but I just couldnt get it done. I love excel, but access is new to me and still tricky. And since everything I do I do it wrong the first time (see marriage 1.0 c1988-1998) I am still having trouble. It is wrapping my mind around it all - I know excel but it when you are working with mostly text it does things like drop off empty columns, leaves in equations, and surrounds text with yucky quotation marks. So the "Access for Dummies" book is on the way to me now.

So at the moment I have the product pages typed in and am simultaneously uploading images (probably 30,000 of them) by ftp and hand assigning products to pages. I like how it is coming out.

First off, the pages are cleaner, much cleaner. Since they are html they load a lot faster (and will be indexed better by search engines). I can do more with html, tho I am by no means a programmer. I like the features of the cart, and it seems to do what I want (once I figure out how it wants to do it). I will give you a page link in a minute but first a disclaimer.

The page is absolutely NOT DONE AT ALL in terms of color, layout, or navigation. I have a designer working on that right now. When finished the look will be similar to my current cart with its ridiculous (but customer loved) navigation and the important 'one click' order buttons. I am building the pages but not yet done filling them all in. Most of the pics are still missing. However go ahead and take a look and let me know how it loads and see what I mean about how crisp it looks.

http://69.94.78.107/index.html
Ummm - DONT order anything there yet!

I will be looking for more feedback next week on the pages, products and pics. Give me some time on that now. :-)

Neal