2 replies to this topic

[arlen]

I've resisted moving to a cart + catalog software package long enough. I have known for a long time that I'm making the job of site development and maintenance much harder than necessary, but have held to certain beliefs and prejudices that have kept me from moving on. The biggest obstacle however has been my concern that if something breaks, I'm helpless to fix it myself. But I'm to the point I need to abandon my old ways and embrace some new ones, as it just isn't serving me to keep editing manually. After researching a lot this weekend, I've picked a php/mysql cart + catalog package that I think will serve me best, but I need some feedback as I'm tempted to do some things that are probably just silly. (I'll try to keep this from getting too long, but if you know me, you know how hard that is for me)

First, let me ask you to tell me where my assumptions are off base. I do understand dynamic pages are spiderable and dynamic vs. static has no perceptible impact on ranking, but I like static pages for a number of other reasons.

- Downtime ... if you break it, the site is down. I can't tell you how many times I run across a down for maintenance notice, including here at HRF though it's been a long time. To my knowledge, my static site has never been down more than 15 minutes at a time due to server issues, never due to broken code. I develop and test locally, then upload when I'm convinced things are ok.

- Loadtimes .... Many of my customers are grandmothers, and it's my guess that most aren't necessarily on the cutting edge of technology - I know many use dial-up. I realize the real concern is server loads w/ dynamic sites, which probably isn't an issue for me, but I'm concerned about doing anything that might reduce my customer's experience and my gut says dynamic 'could'.

- Time-outs & errors ... I'm sure this is just a matter of proper configuration, but I find it intolerable as a customer to find a page or session has expired in the time it took me to pee or follow a link elsewhere, or when I hit the back button. Never a problem w/ static sites.

- File Naming ... though it's not an issue w/ the spiders, it's an issue with me as a customer, with me directing someone to a page, or with someone choosing to link to my site. I like my simple domain / category / product # convention. Even though it's not totally intuitive either it's easy to know you have the whole address, and makes general sense. I have no idea what I'm looking at when I view a dynamic address.

So ... don't these seem like genuine and reasonable concerns? If not, please set me straight.

The software I've chosen has the ability to:

1) simply work as a cart, allowing me to initially just replace my add-to-cart buttons on my static site and get up and running quickly.

2) Serve as a dynamic catalog, but support and integrate w/ static pages.

3) Serve as a static html catalog, I believe as actual saved html files rather than appending 'fake' html extensions. It will also, with an add-on, keep the html catalog updated with any changes made on the admin side without need to tell it to.

My gut says use the static catalog ... is this just dumb and based in my own illinformed predjudices? I "think" I can address all of my concerns listed above, while still having the advantages of dynamic generation and an easy to use back-end management tool. Again, am I making this harder than I should, acting entirely out of ignorance, or is this a good compromise in order to address my concerns above?

[Randy]

Sounds like a good compromise to me Arlen.

FWIW, from the server side of things I would almost always rather see a software package that has the ability to write static pages rather than using mod_rewrite to fake up the static URLs. It's simply less load on the server, which can be important if you have a very busy site or very busy server.

[arlen]

Thanks Randy, so my concerns aren't those of a crazy person, or a paranoid newbie?

My only issue with the html catalog is their directory / file-naming conventions are pretty bloated in my opinion:
(http://www.domain.co...tar_cat_41.html).
And why they chose underscores I couldn't tell ya. They told me they could potentially modify the way file names are generated (or set up mod_rewrights) if I required different file naming, but I think their customization fees will be huge compared to the cost of the software itself, and is probably beyond my means.

Regardless of whether I go dynamic or static for the catalog, I'll need to do 301's on all my current pages, I'd prefer to do that to more logical file names, but may just hae to be careful the way I setup the catalog to minimize the impact of their file naming.