Let’s say that you want to add a “Search the Product Catalog” link on the “About Us” page of your Web site. The “About Us” page is likely a static
HTML page that describes what your company is about (or maybe a dynamic page created by using the Manage Content Pages feature). The “Search” page, instead, is a dynamic page generated by ProductCart. How do you link the former to the latter? You need to know where the search page is located and what its file name is. This is what the Generate Link section of the Control Panel helps you do.
Linking static pages on your Web site to the dynamic Web pages generated by ProductCart is very easy. The Generate Links module provides you with the HTML code to link any page of your Web site to the area of your on-line store that you have selected. To load the Generate Links page, in your ProductCart Control Panel navigate to “ Settings > Images & Navigation > Get Store Links”.
There are two types of links that you will likely use:
To generate product links, select the product that you would like to link to from the drop down menu, then click on the Generate Link button. An absolute link (i.e. containing the site’s full URL) to the product details page for that product will be displayed. This feature is particularly useful if you have static pages on your Web site that contain additional details on a certain product. The description on the product details page could contain HTML links to these additional pages (see Add New Product under Manager Products for information about the description field). And those pages could contain links back to the shopping cart, generated via the Generate Link feature.
The Generate Links page also contains links to most of the storefront pages that you may want to link directly to. If a Web designer is maintaining your Web site for you, he/she will not have any problems adding links to your store on any page of your Web site. All you will have to do is provide him/her with access to the Generate Links page. If you are maintaining your own Web site, all you need is a little familiarity with how HTML links work to be able to effectively use this feature.
If the URLs generated on this page are incorrect, chances are that you did not provide a correct
URL during the activation process, or that the path to your store files has changed. You can manually edit the path to your store files by downloading and editing the following file:
includes/storeconstants.asp. You will see that one of the variables is the absolute path to your store. Correct it, save the file, and then upload it back to your Web server via
FTP.
Linking static pages on your Web site to the dynamic Web pages generated by ProductCart is very easy. The Generate Links module provides you with the HTML code to link any page of your Web site to the area of your on-line store that you have selected. To load the Generate Links page, in your ProductCart Control Panel navigate to “ Settings > Images & Navigation > Get Store Links”.
There are two types of links that you will likely use:
- Product links, which allow you to link directly to a product details page.
- Store links, which allow you to link to store pages such as the “search” page, the “browse by category” page, the “view shopping cart” page, etc.
To generate product links, select the product that you would like to link to from the drop down menu, then click on the Generate Link button. An absolute link (i.e. containing the site’s full URL) to the product details page for that product will be displayed. This feature is particularly useful if you have static pages on your Web site that contain additional details on a certain product. The description on the product details page could contain HTML links to these additional pages (see Add New Product under Manager Products for information about the description field). And those pages could contain links back to the shopping cart, generated via the Generate Link feature.
The Generate Links page also contains links to most of the storefront pages that you may want to link directly to. If a Web designer is maintaining your Web site for you, he/she will not have any problems adding links to your store on any page of your Web site. All you will have to do is provide him/her with access to the Generate Links page. If you are maintaining your own Web site, all you need is a little familiarity with how HTML links work to be able to effectively use this feature.
If the URLs generated on this page are incorrect, chances are that you did not provide a correct
URL during the activation process, or that the path to your store files has changed. You can manually edit the path to your store files by downloading and editing the following file:
includes/storeconstants.asp. You will see that one of the variables is the absolute path to your store. Correct it, save the file, and then upload it back to your Web server via
FTP.