eGenie

There are numerous ways you can build yourself a Web shop. You can dial up an on-line shop creator service, but these are usually of basic design and you need to watch the telephone call charges while you work. Maybe you fancy designing your site by hand in FrontPage or Dreamweaver, but you may need to get to grips with JavaScript to add those 'Buy Now' buttons.

Often, the most convenient approach, to get the most features with the least hassle, is to buy an off-the-shelf catalogue builder. But even with this type of software you'll still need some Internet savvy to make the most of the features on offer.

Dataflex believes that it has just the answer with eGenie, the basic concept being to help those with little or no Internet or Web design experience to create their own e-commerce Web site, simply by filling-in the blanks. No design skills needed, and no HTML programming required.

The software comes on a single CD and installs on to your local hard disk. You can then take as long as you need to develop your Web shop, saving your work and coming back to make adjustments until you're ready to go live. When you're ready, with the help of your Web server details, user ID and password, eGenie dials your ISP and uploads your site as a bunch of standard HTML pages.

No server-side back-end databases to get involved with then, and each page being plain HTML means search engines can catalogue the product pages as well as your main index page. It's probably not a fast enough solution if you have thousands of catalogue items, but then eGenie is designed for the first-time user - not those after a corporate Web presence.

The software loads with a single window display with two panes - one showing a tree-like representation of the details eGenie requires to create your e-commerce Web site. All you do is click the tree entry relating to the section you want to complete, and the software opens the appropriate form in the other window pane.

The next step is simply to tell eGenie about your company details, such as address and email, and now that you're a Webmaster, your contact information. You then get to add a slogan for your company and a description of the business for the main home page - along with the usual company logo if you have one.

The next job is to choose a business classification and add some keywords to better describe your company, so that the search engines can do their job when they spider across your site. Unusually, you can belong to several categories at once.

As most small businesses don't have two Web sites, you'll probably want to use the eGenie software for marketing as well as e-commerce. In order to facilitate this, the software offers a marketing content section where you can create informational pages of your own. These pages can be for any purpose you decide, say for items like a news section or perhaps a description of your services. Every page has a headline plus an area of text and a picture - eGenie decides the layout and design of the pages according to the theme you've chosen.

There isn't a great deal of design freedom. You can alter size and colour of fonts for various sections of the catalogue, and choose an overall theme from the 50 or so FrontPage-like examples available. eGenie also manages advertising banners on your Web pages, one banner for the top and one for the bottom of each page you'd like included on your site.

Unusually, eGenie also offers multiple catalogues on the one Web site, although I couldn't find any file-importing facilities. Entering items, therefore, requires you to type a name and a price, plus a picture for each item. You can add options such as 'size' or 'colour' and so on, to the basic product, and you can assign a tax code for each section of the catalogue. Calculating delivery charges seems to be a case of creating shipping types, and letting the customer choose from one of these at checkout time.