| During the course of this book, we will take a static, HTML-only web site and perform a makeover to turn it into a dynamic, data-driven web application. The site we will be examining is a fictitious company called the Beelze-Bubba Chilli Company (see Figure 3). Beelze-Bubba is a small company that grows and sells chili peppers to restaurants, food manufacturers, and the general public. In addition to chilies, the company also sells its own line of homemade chili sauces and gifts as well as a range of clothing. To view the site, go to www.LearnColdFusionMX.com and follow the links to the case study web site. Figure 3. Static case study web site. Beelze-Bubba prides itself on its combination of devilishly hot peppers and downhome charm. Beelze-Bubba has had a web presence for about a year now, and it has been getting steadily increasing traffic from customers who have an almost cult-like devotion to Beelze-Bubba's super-hot chili peppers and sauces. Although Beelze-Bubba considers its web site successful in reaching its niche market, it faces a lot of the same problems that many growing businesses face with their web presence. The traffic to the Beelze-Bubba web site is growing, and the content needs to be updated constantly. The same content appears in several places throughout the site, and as the site grows, errors are beginning to become commonplace. In addition, Beelze-Bubba is getting inquiries from around the globe, and customers are expressing a desire to order online. In short, static HTML just doesn't cut it anymore. Beelze-Bubba has commissioned you to update its existing site. The company is pretty happy with the look and feel of the site, but you need to make it more dynamic and easier to manage. A careful analysis of the site reveals the following: Beelze-Bubba uses its web site to publish company news. News items change quite frequently, and articles appear in more than one place on the site. This results in many manual HTML-page updates. Beelze-Bubba advertises product specials, which also appear in several places throughout the site. This information changes often and must be updated in several HTML pages. The Products section currently has four categories, and each product has its own product page. As the number of products increases, the number of HTML pages that need to be updated and maintained also grows and will soon become unmanageable. Online customer feedback and inquiries from web site forms are getting misplaced and overlooked. Repeated information (such as navigation bars and header information) appears in all pages. If the navigation structure changes, this must be updated on every page throughout the site. As the number of pages grows, this will become increasingly difficult.
Upon careful review of the existing site and Beelze-Bubba's goals for the future, you suggest the following development plan: Put all products, news, and special information into a database and use this database to dynamically power the Beelze-Bubba web site. Add an online shopping cart facility for customers who want to order online. For content that appears several times throughout the site (such as news, specials, and navigation bars), break the code down into components that are easy to reuse repeatedly. Provide Beelze-Bubba's staff members with a secure online administration section where they can easily update news, specials, and product information in real time.
Beelze-Bubba's management reckons that you are a guru and is very impressed with your recommendations. The company is eager to get started, and like most customers, it wants the site finished yesterday. How are you going to accomplish all this? Why, with ColdFusion MX, of course. As you progress through this book and learn more about ColdFusion MX, you will find that not only is it an extremely powerful web development language, it also is very quick and easy to use. Each step will teach you new ColdFusion concepts and will give you examples of their use. At the end of each step, you will apply this new knowledge to a portion of Beelze-Bubba's web site makeover exercises. By the end of the book, you will have built a new site for Beelze-Bubba that incorporates all the proposed features. Now there's nothing left to do but start coding, so on with the show! |