Website Design Question

[rstuppi]

I'm new to website design although quite old to legacy desktop client/server design. I'll get over it someday.

I have an idea for a website that goes like this:

Home page is "split" into two halves vertically. Left side of the home page has thumbnails of different cars, call it a photo gallery. Right side of the home page is empty.
The thumbnails in the photo galler are static, they must always be shown as items to select.

Click on a thumbnail from the left side and a copy of the selected thumbnail is shown on the right side of the screen along with information about the car, cal this a "todo" list.

Each time a thumbnail is selected from the left side it is added to the todo list. Only one car and its information is shown at any time in the todo list. The items in the todo list must stay until the user deals with it.

Ok, my problem, and this is where my naivete shows itself. If the user goes back a page, it seems I will loose the last added todo item, right? It's like I want the user to only go "forward" by adding items to the todo list. There will be no reason for the user to "go back".

Is this not good web design?

 

[v2Media]

You can maintain the todo list with cookies or server sessions. Preferably sessions. So the list is purely a dump of the session/cookie values put into context by the webpage.

For eg. User loads the site, session is set with blank todo list. User clicks a thumb and an id, or whatever, is stored in the session. User goes back to previous page, there's still one item stored in the session.