Web programmers - Point me in the right direction please

[Rslaugh]

My wife has a vintage clothing store and up until now her website has been used to give people basic info about the store. I want to expand it to allow here to have pics and descriptions of various articles for sale. Some other sites that I've looked at the source code for seem to just set up a table and then hard code everything into it. I'm thinking the best way to do this is have a database with pics, title, category, description and price and have pages that go out and get data to display based on user input.

What tools would be best for this?

am i on the right track?

[kirkroy]

Web space providers usually have templates and such for various site types. Your current provider may have just what you're looking for.

I do some web work for govt intranet use not commercial use. I program with coldfusion, which is easy to learn and quick to develop a site. There are also bunches of user created scripts and sites (e.g., http://www.easycfm.com/). There are other similar languages like PHP and ASP. Your current provider most likely supports one or all of these.

[dkerfoot]

Have a look at ZenCart. http://www.zen-cart.com/

Installed free by many web hosts. I use siteground - as low as $6 month.

[final_t]

I gave up on ZenCart and it's ilk - they all were hard as **** to drive, slow, and just plain ugly. After spending months jerking around with them, I finally gave up and spent $150 on a template cart from ecommercetemplates.com - lot less headache and time spent screwing with it. Only complaint is that $150 just gets you the first 6 months of free updates - then it's $30 for another six months

[dkerfoot]

Compared to building your own as Rslaugh was thinking, ZenCart is a breeze. I have built several database driven websites for my own businesses and for hire.

I am not sure about ecommercetemplates.com, but many of those type of systems are not transportable. If you are not satisfied with their service or their pricing, you are stuck - you can't move your store without starting over from scratch.

ZenCart is basically a build of OSCommerce, but more complete. It actually has a really great template override system that once you understand it, allows you to customize templates (many available for free and/or purchase) without changing any default settings. There is a bit of a learning curve until you "get it", but once the light goes on, it is a very easy to use and complete system.

Folks always want a system that is infinitely flexible and super easy to use. Well, those two goals are diametrically apposed. Of the 1/2 dozen or so ecommerce packages I have evaluated, ZenCart has the best balance. It is fairly easy to get up and running using one of the standard templates. Then, over time you can customize it to fill your wildest dreams.

This book: http://www.zen-cart.com/index.php?main_page=page&id=16 is a huge help. I highly recommend buying the printed version.

[Rslaugh]

Thanks guys. I'll look into both. Appreciate the help.

[bfrikken]

If you are already hosting somewhere, look and see if they have Fanstistico offered. Fantistico is a quick and painless way to install a bunch of different tools to help your site. They also break down the software offered into different categories, and one of them should be E-Commerce. My guess is you will see that they offer Zen Cart and OSCommerce. I installed OSCommerce for my wife and have not regretted it one bit. I remember when researching the two that I explicitly picked OSCommerce over Zen, but can't tell you now what it was that turned me off of Zen.

[dlminehart]

Rick, it wasn't clear to me whether you wanted the site to simply show info from a database or to enable online purchasing. The latter is considerably more demanding, obviously. For the former, you could consider getting a static IP address from your ISP and setting up at least the database portion of the site on one of your own computers using Filemaker Pro as the web server. That database is cheap, very easy to use, easy to configure (and reconfigure), and easy to serve up web pages from. No need to learn PHP or other programming languages. You'll also find other uses for FMPro as you learn about it.

[Alex Franke]

There are a bunch of very low cost linux hosting solutions out there -- like bfrikken says -- to make it very easy to try out new products. You can often get an super deal as a first-time customer.

For example, I signed up with cirtexhosting.com a year ago to try out some linux solutions like shopping carts, blogs, video hosting, and CMS systems. I was planning on just quitting after the discounted trial period (it was $12.50 for a year), but I ended up liking them so much I'm in the process now of moving my sites over from servergrid.net (avoid servergrid, btw -- they've gone down hill)

So consider signing up for an introductory deal at a low intro rate to try out all the cart and purchasing tools -- and then just let the service expire when you're done. This way you don't risk playing around with new technologies on your "production" web site.

[Rslaugh]

thanks guys! We do have access to fanastico and will be looking at ZenCart & OsCommerce. Just what I was looking for. Not having to re-invent the wheel.

[Rslaugh]

followup to original post

I was looking for another post I had done when I came across this one from early '08. Thought I'd post an update of what we ended up doing.

The site is for my wife's vintage clothing store and is located here:
http://www.vintagejoann.com

In the end we decided against an ecommerce site at this time and to concentrate on the brick & mortar business first, using the website to help people find the store and provide information about what's new.

The site is built around Wordpress which was originally designed as blogging software but is so versatile you could build an entire site, including ecommerce, without even including a blog. The download comes with two different themes you can choose from and there are literally thousands more available out there, most of them free.

With a book or two on HTML & CSS it's not too hard to modify a theme to suit your own taste and style. The original theme that VJ is built around is Loopy Blue. If you click on the link in the sidebar About This Site there is a link there for Loopy Blue so you can see what the theme originally looked like.

The theme basically creates the header, footer, body and sidebar(s). The body changes depending on what kind of a page you are displaying. Your basic choices are Post (for your blog if you use one), Pages (which can contain just about anything), and Blogroll (which is basically a list of links which can be customized). There are plugins to do most things you could imagine and a lot that you probably couldn't.

I really like it because mainenance and making changes is very easy and happens across the site. If I want to add a note that we'll be closed for the Holidays or 10% of this month's sales will go to XYZ charity it's very easy to insert in the header and then it appears on every page on the site.

Happy New year!