New User: Yes, I want to kill myself

I'm a new user of Product cart. I've been using Dreamweaver for many years and I have working knowledge of HTML and Javascripting. I have a business and do e-commerce on numerous websites internationally.

So I signed up for Product Cart because I relished the thought of having better customer service for my international customers, many of whom get the emails from us blocked by their IP's. My current cart is a very simple one with HTML buttons you can build in forms. Then you paste the button code in each page and there you go.    I thought having a control panel would be simpler than what I had been using, but wrong again.

And I just don't get asp. And the ProductCart manuals and Dreamweaver extension tutorials get me through making a "template," but where they fall miserably short is plugging an HTML user like myself into understanding how my "template" meshes with the whole asp concept. So the files are there, but how do they work? I'm a Dreamweaver user, not a Microsoft ASP user. This whole system is not intuitive at all.

So.. you make the template, and upload the header and footer files to your directory.. then what the heck? (end of tutorial).   Same with the manual (end of chapter, still clueless)

Time for Product Cart to create the missing manual-- because my project is now going to be very, very late and a few thousand customers just hanging as my web site is offline waiting-- I still don't know how this thing works and I've printed out the entire manual and I could write all kinds of questions at the end of each chapter. When you write a manual, you have to get into the mindset of your users.

Hi Catrina & welcome to the forums!

Personally I've found the documentation about Product Cart some of the best around.
 
The ASP pages in Product Cart uses VBSCRIPT. You can learn more about it at :-
http://www.w3schools.com/Vbscript/default.asp
Most of the time you won't need to worry about the ASP code & many people never touch it.
That said, I know it's useful to understand how things hang together. You can get an understanding of how the pages by looking at one of the files that match a URL that you see in the store. For example pc/viewcategories.asp
If you look at that file you should see a mixture of VBSCRIPT, HTML & occasional Javascript.
In among the VBSCRIPT you will see lots of :
<!--#include file="######.asp"-->
lines where the ###### varies - These are modules of code that are common to lots of pages - such as the languages.asp file AND the header & footer files.
 
As for the bigger images, the AJAX popups do a good job & also there is a link to larger images automatically available for products if I remember correctly. It's in the manual
BTW - You don't HAVE to use the upload & resize functionality (but it's pretty good). If you wish, you can generate the image files in the different sizes & FTP them to the site.

I'm a dreamweaver user as well - but after building the header & footer I've not used it again for my sites. I find it easier to work on any ASP customisations with a power text editor.

I took a quick look at your site & see you don't have the products uploaded yet - The import facility is really useful for this as you can use a spreadsheet of your products (in the correct format) to load them into the database.

HTH

Hamish