ASP Online Course Project

Planning the features of an online T-shirt store requires you to focus on both customer-facing features and back-end management features. Here is a comprehensive guide on how you could plan this using Classic ASP:

1. Product Catalogue: Create a multi-tiered category structure for the products. Each T-shirt should have detailed information such as product name, description, price, SKU, weight, dimensions, and images. It can also have associated attributes like size, color, and design.
2. Shopping Cart: The shopping cart should allow customers to add or remove products, update quantities, apply promo codes, estimate shipping and taxes, and proceed to checkout. Maintain a session-based cart for guests and a user-based cart for logged-in customers.
3. User Authentication and Management: Implement a secure login system for customers using classic ASP's session variables and cookies. You should have features like registration, login, forget password, and account management.
4. Order Management: Store the customer orders in a database table with all details like customer info, shipping address, ordered items, and payment details. Provide an interface to customers to view their order history and track current orders.
5. Payment Gateway Integration: Integrate a secure payment gateway to accept online payments. Classic ASP can integrate with most payment gateways using their APIs. You may also want to offer alternative payment methods like COD (Cash On Delivery).
6. Shipping Integration: Integrate with shipping providers like FedEx, UPS, or USPS for real-time shipping rates, shipping label generation, and tracking shipments.
7. Admin Dashboard: Build a powerful admin dashboard for managing products, orders, customers, reviews, and reports.
8. Customer Reviews and Ratings: Allow customers to leave reviews and ratings for the products they purchased. This would require creating a new table in your database that links reviews and ratings to specific users and products.
9. Search and Filter: Implement a full-text search function on product names and descriptions. Add filters based on size, color, price, and ratings.
10. Responsive Design: Your store should be responsive and optimized for all devices - desktop, mobile, and tablet.
11. SEO Optimized: Create SEO-friendly URLs, add meta tags, and integrate with Google Analytics.
12. Security: Implement SSL for secure connections, use parameterized queries or stored procedures to prevent SQL injection, and validate all input data on server side.

Remember, Classic ASP is an older technology, and while it's capable of performing these functions, newer technologies like ASP.NET MVC, Ruby on Rails, or JavaScript frameworks like React or Vue may offer better performance, security, and ease of development. Nonetheless, if your existing infrastructure is based on Classic ASP, it's entirely possible to develop a comprehensive, feature-rich online T-shirt store. Always ensure your code is clean, efficient, and follows best practices.

How do I plan the features of an Online T-shirt store?
To provide an opportunity to practice what you are learning in this course, we have designed a course project in which you will put into practice what you have learned. Throughout the course you will build and improve pieces of an online store to sell T-shirts from our imaginary TMania Web site. During the course you will use features of ASP to build a better online store that will sell more T-shirts!
The course project store will incorporate features commonly found in successful Web sites. These include:

l
1. Personalization: Using cookies, we'll recognize prior visitors and greet them at the door to our site.
2. Dynamic display: Results of calculations and other data relevant to the particular user will be shown at appropriate times and places in the Web site.
3. Database access: We will use a database to store user information and catalog information on our T-shirts.

Please note that the course project will be a much-simplified version of a actual online store. Components and functions that are outside the skills and techniques covered in this introductory course on Active Server Pages will not be included.

You are assisting in the implementation of the TMania Web site, an online store that will sell T-shirts.
In order to achieve the interactivity of commercial online stores like Amazon you have decided to add Active Server Page technology to the HTML pages of your Web site, as they have.
Your first step, as it would be in developing an actual online store, will be to outline a plan for the Web site. A key component of this plan will be a description of the features and functionality that will be needed to re-create the "sales experience" of a traditional store.

1. The next lesson explains how to install and test Microsoft's Personal Web Server.
2. The next module starts the course by explaining server-side scripting and Active Server Page technology and syntax.

Click the Exercise link to plan the features of your online store.
Course Project - Exercise