Iris Market Builder Demo Site

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Welcome to the demo website.

This is just a "test" setup so you can see how some of the features work. Products displayed here are not for sale through this site, they're just here to act as "fillers" but you can find more info and order them on my website at www.TheMusesGuide.com if you're interested in them.

Understanding How a Content Management System Works

Iris Market Builder is more than just an ecommerce catalog that displays your products. It brings content management together with ecommerce. From within the store admin area you can activate built in features (such as the contact form or FAQ builder) and you can also add new pages. You can create categories and products.

The store admin works by allowing you to "fill in the blanks" as shown in this screenshot:

Then it saves your entered information into a database. That database is then used to create your website and pull in your information.

Each page is dynamically generated by Iris Market Builder.

What's the difference between this and a hand-coded website? First, you don't need to learn HTML or PHP to create your site. IMB takes care of the hard part for you. Second, because it runs on a template system, you can update every page of your site by changing one template file. That template file holds the style and layout of your website and every page is updated when you update that single file. This makes managing your site much easier!

What else should you know? The system functions as shown in this demo. Please take a look and make sure that it works the way you'd like. ;-) If you aren't familiar with shopping carts then you may not realize yet, but "little changes" like moving around thumbnails or product displays are not little changes but require modification of the PHP files. IMB offers you a range of product display styles (read below for more info) but those styles work they way they are shown. The same applies to other features like the contact form, FAQ builder, and event calendar. It will work as shown and if you'd like changes you will need to request a custom programming quote as there is an extra charge for modification of the php files of this cart.

If you are familiar with shopping carts though you quickly see how much more flexible IMB is compared to carts like osCommerce or Zen Cart. It's much easier to integrate your website look and layout, and you have more product display options.

If you have questions about this, just send me an email and I'll be happy to talk with you about it.

Category Layouts

Each category listed in the blue bar above is using a different layout, so explore those to see what your options are for product displays. Different displays can be programmed, but only the layouts shown in this demo store are built in and custom programming is at an additional per project cost.

Nearly all of our clients find a layout above that they love. Within your chosen category layouts (and you can pick a different layout for each category of your shop if you would like) you'll see that some list all products on one page, some create a separate page for each product, etc. You can choose the size of your thumbnails and in this demo I've set them to a height of 100 with a varying width to keep them from having that "squished" look.

Other Features

With the links on the left you can explore the many built in features such as the contact form, FAQ, Search, Site Map and more.

The WYSIWYG Editor

The best way to get a feel for our built-in Editor is to check out the demos available on the support page, as they show step by step how the Editor works.