After the Data Feed has been cleaned up to the point where it is ready to be used to make pages, the appropriate Detail Template, and Index Template need to be designed.
What is a template?
A template is an HTML file you use and design to work with your web site, WebMerge, and your data feed. You will need a template for both the “Index Pages,” as well as the “Detail Pages.”
Most web designers use an existing page from their site to start the process of creating a template. The reasons are easy to understand, as the template will resemble pages on your own site. All you have to do is design where you want the information from the data feed to be placed on pages from your site, by inserting “Placeholders” (WebMerge Tags) in the template. The Placeholders tell WebMerge to insert information from the data feed, for example the price, or description.
WebMerge can also generate a set of web pages based on it’s own template, so you can jump-start your data feed site. The pages generated will be very plain, without your logo, so you really should think about using a template of your own design.
Detail Pages
Detail pages are generated by WebMerge, and feature information on the individual products in your data feed. More specifically, the information in the data feed gets placed in the detail pages by WebMerge.
Detail Template
The design of the detail pages produced by WebMerge is governed
by how you design the Detail Template. You can have your
Detail Template set up to display one product per page, then
WebMerge will generate one page for each product (record)
in the data feed. It is also possible for you to place several
products on one detail page. Selecting the Detail Template
you designed for a particular data feed, can be found on
the “Detail Pages” tab in WebMerge.
Click Here for more details on designing your Detail Template
Index Pages
Index pages are generated by WebMerge, and feature links to the detail pages created by WebMerge. Think of index pages as a way for your visitors to navigate to your detail pages. Your data feed site design might even incorporate one, two or more tiers of index pages, corresponding to a main category, then to sub-categories – then to your detail pages. This becomes important when you want to make it easy for visitors to get to the information you need.
Index Template
Because some data feeds have so many products, it becomes
impractical to have a simple two-tier structure. An example
of this is where there are three hundred “cleaner” products,
and each of them might end up being a link on your main
index page. As you might imagine, the file size would probably
exceed 300k, and take forever to load in the user’s browser,
not to mention be impossible to read with 300 entries.
So a sub-category index is needed as well.
Click Here for more details on designing your Index Template
Where should WebMerge put the files it generates from the feed ?
WebMerge needs to know where you want to put the files it initially generates on your local computer. Some thought should be put into this selection prior to generating pages. Since some of the data feeds are quite large, it is a good idea to have two separate folders. One folder (directory) for the detail pages, and one for the Index pages. A wise designer will not mix the generated pages with any other types of files.
Fig. 1 - Folders suggestion for templates and completed pages
Not mixing file types will allow you to see what pages have been created (without being confusing), and will allow you to compare different generations of pages more easily. For example, if you build pages on July 1st for xyz merchant, and get an update from them and build a new set of pages on September 1st., you will need to know which are the old pages residing at your site. You can make a simple comparison on your hard drive this way, by checking the dates of the files generated.
Old and out of date pages
WebMerge will overwrite existing files if they have the same name as previously generated files. This comes in handy if you want to make redirect pages from the old (out of date) detail pages. So if a visitor lands on a page that was valid a month ago, featuring a 2GHz desktop computer that is now out of stock, a redirect page can be generated to redirect the user to a search page or your main computer page (to make another selection). It may be a good idea to let the user choose whether or not to move on to another page in your site, or go directly to the merchant via an affiliate link, instead of using an automatic redirect.
Automatic redirects to the merchant site are NOT recommended, as this is considered un-ethical, and may actually violate the terms of service for many merchants. Don't risk your relationship with a merchant, because you wish to drive traffic this way. Give the visitor a choice, or direct him to a relevant page inside your site.
Manual redirect pages are particularly useful if pages have been spidered and indexed by a search engine, and you don’t want to lose the traffic sent to that (old) page. In order to generate redirect pages, it will be necessary to make a record of the files that were not over-written in your latest build. There are two very practical solution for this.
Simply writing the files names down will not suffice when using data feeds, as there will likely be far too many out of date files. Accordingly, the process needs to be automated. Ideally, a delimited file needs to be generated, listing the files in a particular directory (folder), for example the directory where you had WebMerge build your detail pages. One can easily go in and delete the newer file names and all of the dates. You can then create a data file that WebMerge can use to build your redirect pages automatically! A program like “FolderInfo” available from Gemmico Products can be used to record the file names and dates needed to generate your file.
A new WebMerge settings file will need to be created, along with a detail template to generate the redirect files. Once complete, simply upload them to your site, over writing the old files.
The second solution, would be to write a server-side redirect, using the .htaccess file. Some web hosting skills are need to accomplish this, and will be covered at a later date. Briefly, you can remove all of the out of date files, and with entries in the .htaccess file, have visitors to those removed pages be automatically redirected to wherever you like.
NEXT SECTION - Designing the Detail Template