After you’ve read Jason Chance’s great piece, 10 Easy Steps to a Horrible Ecommerce Site, you’ll know the critical scope for the design of your client’s online business – the only thing you’ll have left to do is actually design and build the darn thing!
The good news is that Adobe has a new product in their stable called Business Catalyst that will give you the tools you need to get that online store up and running in no time.
Additional reading includes;
- Introduction to Adobe Business Catalyst – Part 1
- Introduction to Adobe Business Catalyst – Part 2
- Introduction to Adobe Business Catalyst – Part 3
- How to Set Up an Online Store with Adobe Business Catalyst
Business Catalyst has a robust and mature set of tools that let you design and build template-driven websites with a database-driven backend, ecommerce, webforms, marketing and reporting – all integrated and easy to use.
In a two-part series, I’ll walk you through the setup of an online store for a fictitious dance school. This will show you how Adobe has delivered a product that combines very fine-grained control and ease of use.
In part one, we’ll take the design, break it down into its components, and set up the site templates and some pages. We’ll also get the online store set up by building product and catalog pages. Finally, we’ll walkthrough some of the integrated marketing capabilities by setting up a subscription list and a newsletter.
In part two, I’ll go deeper into the ecommerce capabilities, showing you how to configure and customize the shopping cart and checkout workflow (go get ’em, Jason!). Then we take a look at the depth of reporting and analytics that come with the site out of the box, as well as reports you can set up on your own. In addition, I’ll show you how to set up accounts for your client to take on some of the administrative tasks without breaking the site along the way.
Let me know what you think of part two and don’t forget to take the quiz from our sponsors Adobe!
Rob FriemanRob Frieman has been building web sites and applications for over 15 years. He currently leads web application development for a large financial services company.
