Introduction - Catalog

When the World Wide Web was first created, the vision was for lots of hypertext documents to be linked together. A person would simply create a document and link it to other content. Most content was created by hand as there were no great publishing tools available at the time. As time went on, people quickly realized that editing sites by hand was a cumbersome and painstaking process.

The next evolution in web publishing was the use of tools like Dreamweaver and FrontPage. These tools provided a WYSIWYG interface to site creation and templating, but massive changes to site structure were almost impossible and interactive dynamic content was not possible. Dreamweaver and FrontPage also tried to insulate the user from as much of the complexity of cascading style sheets as possible. However, in the end most complex sites had enough CSS that the WYSIWYG interface was no longer properly rendering what the site would look like.

So what is the solution to these problems? The Content Management System (CMS allows for the separation of content (text, images, etc.) from display and functionality. Using CMS allows web developers to program how the site will function, look, navigate, and more, while the end users can populate it with content.

The reality is that your store front is not simply a website. It is a custom application that your web developer is building to provide a specific set of functionality to the end customer. You can make your site as feature rich as you want, like a big box retailer's site, or you can have it simple and efficient.

The UltraCart Catalog provides all the core building blocks for a tremendous variety of sites. The system is designed to provide a blank canvas on which you can create the perfect painting.