ASP.NET 2.0 Website Programming Problem - Design - Solution

9.1. Problem

Let's assume the site's owner wants you to implement some features to help him turn the site into a profit-making enterprise. There are a number of ways to do this: Some sites gain revenue from renting advertising space (boxes and banners), some sell subscription-based access to their special content (articles, support forums, downloads, etc.), and some set up an e-commerce store for selling goods online. This chapter covers the design and implementation of an e-commerce store—this option was chosen for our demo web site because it's a good example of non-trivial design and coding, and it gives you a chance to examine some additional ASP.NET 2.0 technology in a real-world scenario. In addition, it is much more common for small sites to sell products, rather than ads and articles, unless they are extremely popular and active (ad revenue is small until your hit and click-through counts get pretty high). Building an e-commerce store from scratch is one of the most difficult jobs for a web developer, and it requires a good design up-front. It's not just a matter of building the site to handle the catalog, the orders, and the payments; a complete business analysis is required. You must identify your audience (potential customers), your competitors, a marketing strategy to promote your site, marketing offers to convince people to shop on your site rather than somewhere else, and plan for offers and other incentives to turn an occasional buyer into a repeat buyer. You also ...