Ways of creating a store?

[MJP]

Hi all, as a newbie to MIVA 5, I am guessing that theres two ways to make a store. First would be to use Miva to create the store. Second would be to Make the store yourself and make it part of your website and just link What you need to MIVA. Meaning you would link the sign in, checkout, cart info and other related links to your site, to MIVA.
Is this true or am I in Lost in space? If true, where would I find the links to all important forms?
Thanks,
Mike
privatepratz@optonline.net

[dotCOM_host]

Yes, you can do it either way. If you let MIVA Merchant generate all the pages for you dynamically, though, you have much more flexibility in not having to create all HTML pages by hand (could be very time consuming) and if you ever want to redesign your site, you won't have to touch hundreds of pages individually - just edit one product template and one overall store "look". There are pros and cons to both approaches. In general, if you have more than ~20 products, it doesn't make much sense to create things by hand. That's what the software is good for - let it do the work for you.

[dotCOM_host]

Oh, as far as the different links - you may really want to visit the online docs for MM5 at http://www.miva.com/docs - there's a whole section on integrating MM within your web site, and that section explains how to link to products, basket contents, checkout, etc.