FRANK's

WebMerge Tutorial

 

Every once in a while you discover a Webmastering tool that takes to you the next level. WebMerge is that kind of a program. I have been using WebMerge for about five months. Using WebMerge I have created thirty multi-tier websites and more than 100,000 Webpages.

 

Prior to WebMerge, I had developed my own convoluted work-around system to create Webpages for my website Creative Quotations using Paradox database, Word Perfect Templates/Merge, ASCII exports, and a WORD Macro. I thought I was doing great to be able to generate and upload 6,000 WebPages in a couple of hours. With WebMerge, I can now do the same task in fifteen minutes!

 

Of course, those 15 minutes only came about after several laborious days of trying to pierce the mysterious veil of understanding of WebMerge, and several more days of perfecting the templates and tweaking WebMerge settings files.

 

There are still a lot of WebMerge features that I have not yet mastered. However, I now feel comfortable enough some aspects of WebMerge to put together the kind of tutorial that so many WebMergers have been asking for. But first, however, a few caveats:

 

First, this is a work in progress, a beta version tutorial. Use it at your own risk. It certainly contain errors, which I hope you will help me correct.

 

Second, the steps and methods proposed here are simply one way of constructing websites using WebMerge. Use these as a starting point, and then improve on them. 

 

Third, this tutorial is NOT intended to be a general WebMerge tutorial.  Rather, it addresses one specific issue -- using WebMerge to create multi-tier Websites. This is, I think, one of the key features that WebMergers have been struggling with, and one that I felt competent to address.

Fourth, the tutorial does include a some generic templates. However, I intentionally kept them to a barebones minimum in order to focus attention on the tutorial theme. Perhaps I over (or under) did it!

 

Fifth, if you find this tutorial useful, and if you decide to buy WebMerge, then please tell Fourth World to credit Baertracks with your referral sale. Click here when you are ready to purchase WebMerge.

 And now, to begin the tutorial . . .

 

This tutorial uses the FUN TO COLLECT (FTC) datafeed as an example. This is a good datafeed for a because it only has ten fields per record, it includes CATEGORY and SUBCATEGORY fields, and, unlike many other datafeeds, it is a good (almost) clean feed that is “ready to use” with WebMerge. I have selected a sample of 20 records from the FUN TO COLLECT datafeed to create a FTC-20 mini-datafeed to use in this tutorial. The 20 record version includes selected records to demonstrate the capability of WebMerge to create multi-tier websites.

 

Conventions used in this tutorial are as follows:

 

1) A TWO-TIER Website includes an INDEX PAGE with links to DETAIL PRODUCT pages.

 

2) A THREE-TIER Website includes an INDEX PAGE with links to CATEGORY Pages that link to DETAIL PRODUCT pages.

 

3) A FOUR-TIER Website includes an INDEX PAGE with a links to CATEGORY Pages that link to SUBCATEGORY Pages that link to DETAIL PRODUCT pages.

4) My HTML pages generated by WebMerge end with .html. Within WebMerge you instruct the program to use .htm (or another extension of your choice)

 

5) The WebMerge template files can be named anything that you wish. In this tutorial they are called:

a)  0-INDEX-TEMPLATE.html,

b)  0-CATEGORY-TEMPLATE.html,

c)  0-SUBCATEGORY-TEMPLATE.html

d)  0-DETAIL-PRODUCT-TEMPLATE.html

 

 

     VERY IMPORTANT: To use this tutorial you should first download the data files. These files include

  •     FUN TO COLLECT (FTC-20) datafeed in text and Excel format

  •     Four WebMerge templates

  •     Six WebMerge settings files to create two-tiered, three-tiered, and four-tiered websites.

 

    All these files are contained in a zipped file,

Click here to download the data and template files

 

    The tutorial files are presented online and currently include the following:

 

Good Luck!

 

FRANK, Baertracks

BeMoreCreative.com