DH Templates

I need help with my website Please??

I am building a website for my parents business, I have to turn their catalogue into a website which will then be linked to my parents main business site, At first I thought about a Pdf document, but because this catalogue has 775 pages, I askd you guys about this and was told to avoid pdf's and to think about a website, So here I am Working with Frontpage to build it, I did a 10 week course with frontpage last year so I get the jist of a few thing, BUT I have been scanning the pages, and after creating a template.dwt I have just been inserting the pages ibto the editable region, but after doing all that and linking it all etc... I have only put around 30 pages so far but last night laying in bed it suddenly dawned on me..... Will these files (scanned pages) be too big and make the site completely slow and useless?????? Please help and advise me on what I can do!!!! PLEASE!!! Thankyou for you input and now I dont know what I am suppose to do, This huge task has been put on my shoulders and now I feel completely useless, they are relying on me to do this one way or another. Will it be easier for me to just put this on as a pdf document?? The company my parents are working with in spain (my parents being the sole uk importers for this company) www.recambiosmarinos.es they have this catalogue on their website as a pdf, I will be gratefull if you could have a look and help me!!

Public Comments

1. I can't think of a single website that contains a stores full large catalogue of merchandise. Places like Target will have a keyword search, that is tied into the required item. They're not using straight HTML, and it would likely be beyond your abilities. Is it possible to make pages out of key pieces, and have an order form for the catalogue?
2. Yes if you scan them they will be images and images are very slow to load especially on nonbroadband. What you need to do is create a template, meaning one perfect page. Type the information in to it, position it properly and when you are satisfied that this is what your pages should look like. Make a copy of this page so you don't have to retype the code and then just swap out the text. Also I would not make pages too long cause people have short attention spans and it takes longer to down load. Don't know how helpful this is but feel free to email me with questions, I can help you sort a few things out. good luck
3. ues that's true scanned files can make the site slow as it takes time to load images. now a days it is trend to lessen the use of images. your site should be text as much a s possible. Use of CSS can be a good option. simple text based dites using CSS can be the best. but to make a good dynamic site you need to have knowledge of some programming languages too. eg. PHP or ASP. or contact me i can help you with that.<prashad4u@gmail.com>
4. Please don't take this in the wrong way, but while you're intentions are good I doubt what you're doing will really benefit your parents' business. Professionally speaking, the way large sites with thousands of products are built is that product information is entered into a database, and pages are generated off that database. Even Yahoo Answers is just a giant database generating pages off a template. So the way to go about this properly is to tie to a DB of your parents' products and have the site go up like that. As the products are changed in the database, the site will auto-update. This requires some decent coding skills, i.e. LAMP architecture (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP). The reason that page-scanning and whatnot is a poor choice... 1. How will people know what stuff is on what page? 2. Who will order from such a setup? Will a user trust a web site that doesn't funtion like other professionally done websites? 3. What you're building is essentially an image gallery, why not use various free web software designed for that rather than trying to manually produce it? 4. 775 pages is a LOT of stuff to sift through, especially manually. The user experience will be weak. 5. 775 pages is a LOT of stuff to update when the catalog is updated, and if the layout changes significantly you'll have a huge mess on your hands and will practically be re-building the entire site from scratch. It's not a scalable solution. I'm not trying to discourage you, but rather point you in the right direction... I know you mean well but if you want this site to be truly useful I would suggest another approach...
5. Hi Buddy, Make the catalogue to PDF format, zip it. It'll reduce size and faster to download.