e-commerce system driven by an OFFLINE database
Our client Earths Gifts is an online retailer selling gemstone jewellery and healing gifts. They already had an online shop which had been implemented using an off the shelf package called Actinic Catalog, however they had some operational concerns.
Earths Gifts were finding Actinic time consuming to use on a day to day basis and some of their customers were reporting that the site was not always working correctly (later found to be down to poor use of JavaScript). They turned to Support for Organisations to develop a bespoke database driven website.
Earths Gifts had some specific requirements:
- Good search engine performance was a must
- The backend database needed to be user friendly for easy day to day maintenance
- The website needed to be easy to use by customers
- The website needed to be capable of working on all browsers
- The website needed to “look nice”
- The database needed to be sufficiently secure to minimise the risk of hacking.
The final design. An offline database driven e-commerce system:
The traditional approach for database driven websites is to have the pages dynamically driven and the database and webpages residing on the same server. It is well known, however that search engines strongly favour static web pages over dynamically driven web pages. So we required a database driven website that produced static web pages. We decided therefore to design a database driven content management system which created static web pages. The system was designed using Microsoft Access and Visual Basic for Applications (VBA). We decided to design the database system that would be used on a PC on the clients LAN, would create static pages on the same PC and then use FTP to upload the static pages to a web server.
A separate database existed online for the purpose of storing purchase details and providing a search facility for the site contents. Orders were downloaded into the content management system database.
The content management database system used a conventional Microsoft Access front end and all data entry actions were grouped for ease of use. An example of one of the Microsoft Access data entry forms we designed is shown below.
The website itself was written in standards compliant XHTML and CSS2. It was designed to be tableless and not dependant upon JavaScript to provide maximum accessibility to all users. Features like paper friendly print layouts were included. A page from the website is shown below.
To visit the website follow the link below:
Copyright 2009 SFOL Database Services.
