Here’s the thing; it’s a lot of hassle for everyone if you have to hand-code in every new item. If the phone headset site finds a new distributor and gets a hundred new types of headsets in, or the religious jewelry site comes up with a new rosary necklace every week or so, they’ll need to be able to add the new products. That’s why you’ve created a fancy database-driven CMS, so they can add in the information and it automatically populates to the website.

But what happens when the new phone headset distributor sends a bunch of 1,500 pixel images when your system is designed to display 100 pixel thumbnails and 500 pixel normal images? What happens when the religious jewelry pictures are all high-resolution images that will take far too long to load? When the site layout is based on the idea of the images being a certain size, and then new images are introduced that aren’t that size, problems occur.

Now, you might be saying, “Oh come on, this is easy, just include a width=whatever height=whatever in your image tag and call it a day.” If so, hit yourself. I’ll wait.

See, the reason you see those attributes added to the images so often is, the great majority of the time, because it helps with getting the images indexed in the search engines. It’s not to actually set the image size. If you try to set the image size with them, the quality is dramatically reduced. And, if you’re sizing down, you wind up dealing with full-size loading time for a part-sized image.

Your next option is to get the client to make sure any images it uploads are properly sized. Not too likely. Aside from the very real possibility that they’ll forget what sizes to use, make a mistake, just not bother, or try to do it with Paint or something equally ludicrous, that’s just giving them more work, and one of your jobs is to minimize the amount of work and complexity they have to deal with for running their website.

So how do you get these phone headsets to fit in the proper format, and these religious jewelry pieces to load in an acceptable amount of time? Well, it just so happens that there’s some php code that can resize images automatically on the server. It’s not perfect for enlarging, but it does a pretty clean reduction, and it’s not too hard to code up a loop that will run through existing images to size them, and then add the resizer to the backend of the admin – right by where the image uploads works. Personally, I prefer setting some variables to determine the size and folder of the image, and then having it size the image in the chosen ways (a thumbnail, standard view size, and full size, for example), and save each to their own folders, keeping a single image column in the database.

So, when working on admin systems for e-commerce sites, from phone headsets to religious jewelry, expect there to be pictures. Prepare for them for the first batch of uploads and for future updates by including dynamic image resizing. It will make things easier on you and the client, and result in a cleaner, nicer-looking, and more easily updated website.

Dustin Schwerman is the head web designer for Truly Unique Website Design. Truly Unique works on websites of all varieties; their clients may offer products and services ranging from religious jewelry to phone headsets.

Article Source: http://bb-articles.com

Thus, the admin system.  Now, many web designers may go straight for the pre-built templates that they just have to initialize and guide the client through using.  That’s fair enough, but the purpose of this article is the <i>custom</i> web design admin system.  By building the system custom, you have the advantage of complete control over its functionality.  Client doesn’t need to track inventory?  Don’t even confuse them with the link.  Client wants some of its phone headsets fading in and out on the home page?  You can add a field to the image manager so they can select which ones themselves, and link them right up to the actual item’s page.  Have a beautiful custom web design for the site’s layout, maybe even a cutting-edge Flash site?  Integrate the database right into it.

So what might a site selling phone headsets need for their admin system.  Well, first off, they of course need to be able to manage their products; add, edit, and delete their headsets as they get new ones, upgrade existing ones, or get rid of now-outdated models.  Chances are they’ll want to divide these into categories; you can set the categories to choose from in a drop-down list or by checkboxes of course, but it doesn’t take much to set things up so they can create new categories as things go (tip: make sure the category navigation on the site itself is vertical).  They may also want a system to keep track of their orders, and possibly to edit the text on their pages.

Regardless of whether it’s phone headsets, high-end computer systems, or children’s toys, the best way to maintain an e-commerce site is through a database-driven admin system.  By custom-building the system with your client’s business in mind, you maximize your ability to integrate and control how the products work within your code, while still giving your client the freedom to update and maintain its own website.

Dustin Schwerman is the head web designer for Truly Unique Website Design. Truly Unique offers custom web design services, and their clients offer diverse products and services such as phone headsets.

Article Source: http://bb-articles.com