E-Commerce Application: PC Concepts.
Design Brief:
This assignment was to be the most challenging yet most rewarding piece of work as it underpinned career aspirations. The objectives were to create a dummy e-commerce site using the server side scripting language ASP, Microsoft Access for the database, JavaScript for client side validation and SQL.
However before coding could begin the following tasks had to be completed:
- Research two existing e-commerce sites and critically analyze them in order to find their strengths and weaknesses and gain a useful insight into how e-commerce sites work.
- Plan and implement the database, its tables and their relationships. In addition to normalizing the tables and entities down to their 3NF to eliminate any redundant entities from the database structure.
- Code the required ASP pages using a text-editor and debug any errors. Required pages were deemed as being:
- Home Page
- Register page
- Login page
- Checkout page
- Product information page.
These required pages allowed users to browse the shops products, add them to a shopping cart and register as customers. The option was left to implement other features onto our sites, for instance a search engine was a useful feature, but not a requirement for passing the module.
Rationale:
The site interface was designed in XHTML, and CSS using a 3 column layout, with ASP and Microsoft Access database to add interactivity. However data such as ‘user state’ and information about the quantity of items in their cart is temporarily stored by a cookie.
The inspiration behind the e-commerce site came from an existing company, based in Walkden, Manchester. The primary aim was to make the e-commerce site scalable, so that if new products were available, it could be extended at a later date and the first instance of this implementation is by the code used to create the left side navigation which displays the product categories found within the database.
The mini shopping cart was implemented after reviewing the Micro Direct website and deemed it to be a useful feature for interacting with customers, as was the personalised greeting when the user logs in.
Client side scripting using JavaScript was implemented on all forms to stop users creating fake customer accounts, which would eventually clog up the database.
In addition client side scripting disabled users from adding negative or invalid numbers in the quantity field and also helped to check stock and warn if quantity of an item chosen exceeded stock levels.
Important Please Note: Despite this site functioning as a real commercial site it is only a dummy and the experience ends when checking out.
NO payments are taken as there are no banks or third party payment sites involved.
Skills and software used:
- CSS.
- ASP.
- XHTML.
- Database Development.
- JavaScript.
- Cookies.
- Adobe Photoshop.
- Macromedia Dreamweaver.
Final Product
You can view the E-Commerce Application, PC Concepts by clicking the link below.
View the E-Commerce Application.
