Part 4–A Look at the Information Component of Our E-Commerce Site

Please visit http://www.byobwebsite.com/05/video-tutorials/how-to-make-an-e-commerce-website/using-wordpress-and-thesis/the-information-component/ for more.

Okay. Welcome back to Part 4 of Lesson 1 of the Build Your Own E-Commerce Web Site tutorial series. In this part of the lesson we’re going to take a look in depth at the Information component of the site.

General Site Content (Marketing and Informative Blog Posts)

We start off here with the general information or the general content of the site. For example, that is both the marketing sales information that you have on your sales page and also the informative posts that you have on your blog. Again the purpose of this blog is to drive customers to your site because you have information here that they’re interested in and so this is going to play a very significant role in the development of your e-commerce Web site.

Product Related Content, Administrative Content and SEO

The second information section is the Product Related Content and I think we’ve probably discussed that at length already. But it is an important part of this information system. The third part is the Administrative Content and again that involves all of the policies, facts and support information. And then finally we have the SEO component. Now this SEO component is going to be a very significant element of the organization of this site because we want to follow Google’s advice about how to construct a site or how to organize a site so that means we’ll be working on a site structure that supports semantic URLs.

Two Types of E-store Catalogs

A semantic URL is a URL that a person can read. We have two different structures, we have the structure of pages and we have the structure of posts on the site. The page structure is going to start off with the store name and then it will have the catalog and it will have the product type. For example, if we come back over here looking at Books you can see “thesisecommerce.com” is the store name and the catalog name is “catalog-thesis”. If it hasn’t been apparent to you yet what we have here are two different styles of catalogs and we’ll learn to create both different styles in the process of this course. One style of catalog is called the “e-store catalog” and the other style of catalog is the “Thesis style catalog”. So what we have here is the store name, the catalog name and the product type.

For our “Post URL structure” there’s going to be a little bit more additional information. We’re going to have the Store Name again. There will be a number and the purpose for this number is to increase the performance of WordPress as it sorts through the different posts and pages. This number helps WordPress index the stuff and so we’re going to leave a number in that place. The next thing will be the name of the category that the product is in and then the name of the product type of the category and then the product name itself.

If we come back over and look at the site and go to this product you can see that we have our store name ”thesisecommerce”, we have the number “04” (the month that this post was created), we have our category name which is “products”, we have the product type name which is “books” and then we have the name of the product, “lemon-zest–confessions- of-a-wordpress-trainer”. So when somebody is looking at this they can tell that it’s the “thesisecommerce” store and they’re looking in products of the type “books” and there’s the name of the product. We’ll be organizing our site in order to be able to accomplish that.

And that wraps up Part 4 of Lesson 1 of the Build Your Own E-Commerce Web Site tutorial series. In Part 5 we’re going to take a look at the Marketing component of the site.

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4. Added :04-Jan-11
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