Erol 2

These days, creating your own e-commerce Web site is, thankfully, a relatively painless process, with both online Web shop builders and offline catalogue creators from major vendors vying for your business. With Erol 2 (Electronic Retail On Line), the Web-shop construction process is initially very similar to other offerings. The potential shopkeeper inputs details of the items to be sold into a database, and the software will then create a Web site based on the data supplied.

With most e-commerce software, you can usually enter an advertorial message or two to display on the overall home page, with your company details posted on a contacts page and usually a terms and conditions page offered as well. Eventually, when all the data is ready, you can choose a theme or template for the overall look and feel of the site.

Unfortunately, it's this last element that can often be the limiting factor. If you want your shop to be unique (and let's face it, who doesn't?), then you'll find that changing the template layout can be, at the very least, a daunting task.

Templates are the intermediary files that set the layout of the eventual Web shop. Often written in HTML, these also contain script-based proprietary placement holder tags for the Web shop's e-commerce functionality. In theory if you can move the placement holders and alter the HTML, then you can put anything on the page pretty much where you want.

Unfortunately, even in the best examples, this is hardly intuitive. First, you'll need to locate the appropriate template, which corresponds to the part of the Web site you want to change. Then you'll need to load that template into a text editor and get stuck into some reprogramming at a very base level. You'll then have to rebuild your shop and preview the layout, to see if you've managed the job properly. The achievable results can be impressive, but probably only if you're a Web developer familiar with HTML and JavaScript in the first place.

Dreamteam has approached the creation of an e-commerce Web shop from a very different angle. Although Erol still accumulates a database of company details and products from which your Web site is built, you actually build the site a page at a time, putting what you want where you want it in the process.

Erol actually began life as an in-house application written by the Web-design arm of Dreamteam. The software was developed specifically to handle the management of a complex e-commerce Web site for a major client. As you might expect, being designed by Web designers, this latest version of Erol promises not only solid e-commerce capability, but also plenty of design flexibility built in.

Pixel-perfect placement

Being page-based, every page has a header and footer area where you can insert either plain text or import HTML code directly. You can then apply the more obvious items like background images and colour schemes to a page, plus features such as CCS (Cascading Style Sheet) commands, JavaScript and VBScript elements.

Although Erol 2 doesn't feature a wysiwyg editor front end like Microsoft's FrontPage or Macromedia's Dreamweaver, anywhere you can type or paste text you can also take advantage of Erol 2's built-in HTML Editor. This tool offers a basic text input area along with a toolbar to insert HTML tags for bold, underline, italics and so on. Using the editor, you can also insert links to other pages or images to display - simply by choosing the appropriate button. HTML form elements are also on the menu, plus drop-down navigation boxes and search fields. To help you get it right, a window alongside shows a live preview of how that element will look on the finished site.