Adobe Business Catalyst

Adobe Business Catalyst is a hosted application for building and managing online businesses. Using this unified platform and without back-end coding, Web designers can build everything from amazing Websites to powerful online stores, beautiful brochure-ware sites to mini-sites. To work in BC, designers use Dreamweaver (CS4 or later) with the free Business Catalyst extension installed.

The cost of hosting a site with BC ranges from a few dollars a month and up, depending on the size of the site and the level of traffic, and the designer can pass on the cost to their client. This is the first official book on using BC. In this comprehensive, hands-on, step-by-step guide, the reader will learn how to set up eCommerce on the hosted solution.

As they work through the chapters, the readers can also follow along with the video tutorials linked in from AdobeTV (tv.adobe.com). This book covers how to set up a new site, work with web pages, organize the site hierarchy, upload assets via FTP, configure modules, and customize their appearance. It includes best practices to set up site navigation, forums, password-protected areas and web forms.

By the end, the reader will have their own working online business. Once it is live, the designer or the client can use the robust reporting interface in Business Catalyst to review metrics and run custom reports in the customer database. By analyzing the data, the online store can be optimized to improve sales revenue and increase customer adoption.