When evaluating these various solutions, you should not only consider the cost of the package but how much it will cost to customize it to suit your individual needs. Often what looks like an inexpensive setup at the outset can end up eating away at your budget as you try to add new features or redo the design. Make sure you have room to grow. Are there better, stronger, and faster options available to you if your business expands (you should be so lucky!)? Find out before you take the plunge.

    So what about ramforless.com? Which solution will meet all of its requirements?

    Using your handy Requirements Document, you search high and low for an off-the-shelf package that can meet ramforless.com's needs. But one thing is missing, a critical, top-priority feature that you gotta have: the configurator. This is the gizmo that will figure out what type of RAM chips your customers need once they plug in the kind of systems they have. No system has a configurator as part of its standard features, and you can't go forward without it. So like it or not, it seems that building an application from scratch is going to be the best way to go.

    You talk to the MIS people about the technology they originally used to create the configurator. It turns out that all of the configurator information is stored on a SQL Server 6.5 database. You dig through your notes and discover that Allaire ColdFusion can pull data from any ODBC data source. That's a big plus, but you need to see how ColdFusion addresses your other requirements.

    So you will need to consider:

• Displaying Products
• Order and transaction processing
• Attracting customers
• Fulfillment and customer service
• Software and hosting

    Let's review them now.

Displaying Products
    Denise's design and Mark's configurator give you the information you need to drive the front-end experience. ColdFusion's ability to pull data means that you can leverage Mark's past work with Microsoft's SQL Server. And because you can easily place ColdFusion CFML tags between HTML tags, you can make the pages look exactly the way Denise wants.

Order and Transaction Processing
    ColdFusion does not come with a shopping cart, but the ColdFusion guidebook you bought has some shopping cart examples in it. Meanwhile, payments can be handled through ColdFusion's ready-made interface with CyberCash, and taxes can be handled with its interface with Taxware. You'll have to come up with your own shipping algorithm, but with ColdFusion's extensive application language, that shouldn't be too big a deal.

Attracting Customers
    You shouldn't use ColdFusion to place your advertisements; there are other products out there that do a better job of this. But you can use it to track people's responses to your ads. You can embed media codes in each ad and then use ColdFusion's application language to detect the incoming source codes and add them to customers' histories or even to the orders they place. This means that you can tie the source codes to the sales they generate and figure out which ads are actually making you money. (More about this can be found in Lesson 5.)

Fulfillment and Customer Service
    You don't want to build a new fulfillment system: The one you have now works well enough. It runs on that mainframe from the '70s, and you don't want to get bogged down with that thing. For now, the fulfillment department will have to reenter orders manually and handle customer inquiries about orders through the company's 800 number. It's not the slickest plan, but it'll work for now, and ColdFusion is flexible enough to accommodate improvements in the future.

Software and Hosting
    There are a bunch of top-tier hosting services that support dedicated NT hosting environments and also offer leased line access. ColdFusion works great with NT, but it's also available for Solaris if you decide to change over to a Unix OS at some point. If you needed to scale, you could set up a single Unix database server that feeds a series of NT application servers. That way, you could add additional application servers and not worry so much about data replication.

    Allaire's ColdFusion application engine seems to be a solid match. You can set up the configurator without too many headaches, and it supports most of the extensions you need. With Frank in fulfillment's "flat-rate" scheme (described in Lesson 3), your shipping and handling is covered — for the time being, at least. You're saving the creation of a more flexible and customizable shipping solution for the next redesign.

    So you're set. All the planning and research has finally paid off, and you now have a solution that meets your needs with minimal compromise. The site's going to take some significant work upfront, but you'll be happy in the long run when it continues to do all that you require, even as your company grows and evolves.

    Some time later, after the application of a lot of elbow grease, your site goes live. The industry is abuzz, customers roll in, everyone gets a raise, and you take off for a well-deserved vacation.