The Web Store ships with the look and feel of the West Wind Web Site. Customizing this look and feel requires making changes to the HTML pages that make up the store.

The Web Store was designed was put together with FrontPage (without extensions), and uses Web Connections HTML templates to embed content into the pages. You can simply pull up each of the pages and modify them in your favorite HTML editor.

Component based
When you pull up any of the store's .wws Pages you'll notice that the header and the left sidebar don't display in the templates. The reason for this is that these components are loaded dynamically at runtime from two separate template files:

• Header.wws
  Contains the header for the Web page. In the default Web store, it's the West Wind Technologies logo and the general Web site menu strip. To customize the header of the page simply add your own HTML and/or images to the header. The header sits ontop of the page ontop of the main page HTML table, but it's not part of that table.

• Leftsidebar.wws
  Contains the sidebar menu containing all the various store related menu options. This menu is a two part menu that consists of a static top part and a dynamic list of categories which is generated via code and embedded using a template tag.
  

Note:
The header and sidebar components are cached on the server. If you make changes to these two files you need to stop and restart the Web Connection server to force the cache cursor to unload. If you would like to change this behavior you can change the template insertions to File2Var() instead of CacheFile() to pull in the files from disk. All other pages are loaded on everyhit unless you enable WWC_CACHE_TEMPLATES.

The main pages then conist only of the main table which leaves room for the header at the top and the sidebarmenu in an empty column on the left. You can of course customize any of the store pages directly.

All content is embedded into these pages using standard Web Connection expression tags. For example:

<%= oItem.oData.Description %>

which make up expressions from any in scope variables or object expressions. For more information on how this works, see the Web Connection documentation on HTML Templates.