Building the Nova website - First Steps

2008 was the year of learning something about building a web site. I had done a little HTML in the past and did some Dreamweaver programming as well, but this time I decided that I would build a database driven site. Since I already had a pretty sweet inventory tracking system, I figured I could integrate the catalog into our web site; all I needed to do was learn how to program in ASP.NET, C# and throw in a little HTML and CSS.

Could it be more complicated? I don't think so. There's the presentation layer, which consists of ASPX and CSS - 2 separate files, then the server side page in C#, then the data access layer, stored procedures to get to the data on the SQL Server, and finally the database itself. Simple, really.

Here's an example of one of the pages we built for Royal Mahogany, Andiroba Prefinished Flooring. All the specifications for the product are stored in the database - we had to add quite a few fields to capture all the data. And with over 1000 active products, that means tons of data entry.