Custom Web Design and the Admin System

So you’re ready to set up your client’s e-commerce site selling, eh, headsets.  They have phone headsets, bluetooths, wireless and corded headsets, tiny little headsets that fit right in your ear, and a big pair of earmuffs that their neighbor gave them three birthdays back.  Of course, getting all that up on the web means they need pages to display the items.  They need categories to hold them in.  They need individual pages for full descriptions, thumbnails for groups, and big full-size high-resolution images so people can see just how sleak and streamlined the headsets are.  They also need a way to keep all of these things in order, and to add new ones or edit the existing ones as time goes on.  But you’re a web designer; you’re not <i>actually</i> going to hand-code a specific page for every item, manually resize every image in Photoshop and type in {a href=”images/really-big-image-of-another-phone-headset.jpg”}{img src=”images/not-so-big-image-of-that-same-phone-headset.jpg” alt=”this is the 200th phone headset image I’ve coded in why does my suffering continue?” /}{/a}, and wake up in the middle of the night with phonecalls asking you to change the price of headset #102 from $25.00 to $24.95.  You have databases for all that, and forms, and clients who swear roundly that they want to be able to update their website themselves.

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their products; add, edit, and delete their headsets as they get new ones, upgrade existing ones, or get rid of now-outdated models.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.

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