e-commerce 4 video scripts

To setup a website for your company, you need to license a domain name such as dom.edu or millerjw.com. You also need a place to host your files and data and to make them available to the entire world 24 hours per day seven days per week. You can go to a hosting company to license the resources needed to host your web site. The hosting company can also license you a domain name.

I am now using the hosting company, a2hosting as an example. This is the company that hosts dombsb.com. The least expensive way to host a site is to place it on a server shared with other customers of the hosting site. If you have a large high volume e-commerce site, then you will want to pay a lot more and get your own private server.

Scrolling down, I can see that we have been successful at licensing the name dombsb999.com. Most hosts attempt to upsell additional names and features during the application process. I will turn down the opportunity to pay more for additional names and will continue to the next step.

Hosting companies will try to sign you up for multiple years. The advantage to you is that you get the first year discount rate for the entire term. In this example, I will license only one year because maybe I won't be satisfied with this host and will want to move my site.

Most hosts will offer to keep your name and address off of public internet directories by substituting their name and address for yours. My sites are all non-profit and don't generate controversy so I will turn down this option..

So in this example, I will pay $123 to license a domain name and host my site. You must remember to renew the license for the domain name every year or you could loose your name forever. Obviously major companies like Microsoft and IBM are careful about this.

You have seen the "all eggs in one basket" approach. If we should get into a dispute with our host, we can setup a copy of our site on another host but we cannot use our domain name because the hosting company controls it. Before you think that you won't get into a dispute, consider the case where a hacker gains access to your hosting account and uses it to send out hundreds of thousands of emails. This violates your hosting terms of service and the host will take your site down.

This is what I have done with millerjw.com and dombsb.com. I used the domain name registrar directnic.com to register my domains. Alternatively, you can use a different registrar such as godaddy.com or namecheap.com.

I have just logged in to my account at directnic.com have taken the option to show all my services. Here is a list of the nine names I currently have under license. Some of these I have used for testing and will allow to expire.

Let's look at the details for millerjw.com. In this case, I accepted the privacy option because it was free. Scrolling down, you can see I have told directnic that I want traffic for this domain directed to the a2hosting company.

This separation of domain name and host has worked well for me. In June of 2020, I moved both dombsb.com and millerjw.com from the Midphase hosting company to the a2hosting hosting company because secure (https) hosting was an expensive option at Midphase and part of the base price at a2hosting. If the domain name is registered with a hosting company, you generally have to go through technical support and the sales department to convince them to point the domain name to another host or to release the domain name to your control.

Now you have seen how to license a domain name and web hosting resources. You will use the domain name dombsb.com at the a2hosting company in your e-commerce homework assignment

We are going to use Dreamweaver to create our website and to move files from acats2k12.dom.edu to our dombsb.com site on the a2hosting server. Start at remoteaccess.dom.edu and select Adobe Dreamweaver CS6.

To get started, select Site and New Site. I have named my site JWM. You should pick your own name. I would like to store my web sites files in the Documents folder in my user account on acats2k12.dom.edu.

Next, I must tell Dreamweaver how to reach our web host. So I click on Servers and then on the plus sign to add a new server. I can pick any Servername I want and I picked dombsb.

The rest of the information is usually given to you by the website administrator. We are told to use the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) and that the FTP address is ftp.dombsb.com. We are also told to use username group99@dombsb.com and password group99* where asterisk is Shift+8 on the keyboard. Finally, we are told to use a website address of https://www.dombsb.com/gsb622/group99

Let's prove that this works by hitting the test button. ln this case it did. If it didn't work for you first double check all the information on the Sever Name screen and retry. If that still does not work, contact me for technical support.

You are not required to put an image on your home page but I would like to do it anyway. I can use my own photographs or any non-copyrighted image from the internet. Using Firefox on acats, I navigate to the BSB Faculty page and scroll down to my own image. Then I save the image to my Documents folder on acats. I am done with Firefox so I exit.

Next I want to run Dreamweaver on acats. One in Dreamweaver, I make sure that the site I created previously appears in the DropBox in the upper right part of the screen. Yes it does.

To create my home page, I will create a new page from a template. The template I have selected is called "2 column fixed left sidebar header and footer" I save my new page right away to get it in the proper location. It is very important to save the page where I told Dreamweaver I would be keeping my files. So, I will give this page the name jwmhome.html and save it to my Documents on acats.

Next, I can modify the page. First, I wlll put the image I saved earlier in the logo area by clicking on the logo area and then dragging from the SRC box in properties to the name of my image file. The image I saved earlier appears.

Here, I am changing the left sidebar to have two only two items - "Home" and "About". Then I will save again. To see if you have defined your site correctly to Dreamweaver and saved your home page in the right place, do a Site / Put now. This will upload your homepage. When you tell Dreamweaver to upload dependent files as well, it will also upload any other files on the site that you have linked to. In my case, Dreamweaver will upload my image. Let's see if that worked. Back on my own machine, I start a browser and go to dombsb.com. I follow the links to group99 and look for my file. Yes, there it is jwmhome.html. I am now going back to Dreamweaver on acats to make some more changes to my home page. This concludes the audio portion of the video. You can stop the video now or watch other changes that I am making to my home page.

Now, I can just make a few changes and declare this task done. Since you can find out all about me from Dominican's Sedona System. I will just create a link to a PDF containing that information, and put the page on the site using site put. Since I did not save the page ahead of time, Dreamweaver will prompt ask me if I want to save the page and I will answer yes.

The last required work in this assignment is to link our pages together. The work has been divided into these 11 steps. You will be surprised at how quickly these can be done.

The About Page has been loaded and we can see near the top of the Dreamweaver Screen that the name of this page that will appear on the Browser Tab is "Untitled Document". Let's change it to About Miller.

Step 2. Update the sidebar and create the link to the Home Page. Select Home on the Side Bar and then Drag a line from Link in Properties to the Home Page in the listing of site files.

Steps 3-7 Update the Home Page. First, load the home page. Then Change the Title and add the link to the About Page. Select About on the side bar and the drag a line from Link in Properties to the About Page in the listing of site files.

Step 8. Web pages are described my Hyper Text Markup Language or HTML. Dreamweaver generates this HTML for you. Other website builders such as Weebly and Wix also do this. Using "View Code and Design" we can see what Dreamweaver has generated. Here we can see the HTML code to link to the About Page.

Even Canvas allows the Instructor to view and Update HTML code. Back on my own machine in Canvas, I have loaded the page Corporate and Government Videos from Module 4 in our course. When Editing the page, I can select HTML Editor and make changes directly to the HTML code. This is useful if I have some HTML code from a web site that I would like to place into a Canvas Page.

Step 11. Let's find our Home Page in dombsb.com and load it and test the link to the About Page. Now that the About Page is loaded, let's test the link back to the Home Page. The links work so we are done with the required work for this assignment.

Conclusion: You have practiced the basics of creating web pages with links an images and uploading those pages to a site on the World Wide Web. Clearly, real sites have more pages. These pages might include the ability to load data from a database like Amazon does when retrieving information about specific books and other items.

Feel free to build more pages and make updates to your existing pages. You will have access to this site at least for six months. Your pages will be deleted at the end of this course unless you ask me to leave them up.