Best design for product display

[luke]

Hi everyone,

I like some advice on the best way to design a webpage that will display alot of products.

My experience is limited to working in dreamweaver in display mode. I'm only vaguely familiar with the HTML code that rests behind.

I've been asked if I can design a website for a company that displays a stack of products and I'd like to know what other might do in the same situation.

For example, the page content might look like this:

Category1
-------------
Product 1
Product 2
Product 3

Category2
-------------
Product 1
Product 2
Product 3

etc.

As far as my experience allows, I would have to create a template and input each page content individually. However, this seems somewhat of an arduous task and I'm wondering if there is a quicker way of designing the structure of the webpage and page loading times rather than having to reload a full HTML page every time.

At this point in time, I'm thinking I'll use a java collapsible menu to navigate the content. but lets estimate they have 100 products, do I really need to input the text, image, and product information along with any links for the product 100 times?

Bloody hope not...

 

[luke]

super helpful community.

 

[PixelPusher]

Luke, bare in mind this forum has many spammers, and yes it is very annoying.

Now you are wanting to build a website that has many pages with product lists...but you dont want to have to build a separate page for each list? but you have limited HTML knowledge? but you are familiar with javascript or java (two different languages)?

Do you have an example/idea of the layout for a single product listing? The title, picture, and text? I can help you setup the HTML.
As far as building the page dynamically, my first suggestion would be use PHP. And in regards to inputing the 100 products....well you will have to store the images, titles, and description text somewhere. If you use PHP, you can build arrays to handle all the images and titles. Depending on how large the description text is, you might want to store that in a XML doc and have PHP parse it out for each product.

Need more info to really help you more.