Eventually we hope to stop with the printed version completely. The average cost per order should come down as well, as online order entry will gradually be adopted by our customers. The Chown Online Catalog features over 6000 products, this is a subset of what we have in our showroom. With these kind of quantities you need a data driven approach. If you have only 100 items, you may be able to hardcode your products on static HTML pages, but we need a dynamic data driven approach.
Users can also do a text search on product attributes such as model, style and finish.
Using a data driven approach, web pages are composed 'on the fly' when a user makes a search request. The biggest task was creating the data and images for our catalog. The catalog is organized into categories of brands and products. When we you view a particular category, such as cabinet drawer knobs, you will see a list of corresponding thumbnails pictures and descriptions. You can click on an item and zoom in to see a bigger color picture with a detailed description and a table of item numbers, various sizes, selling prices and availability.