Practical eCommerce

tcraw1010

. . . be it nobeler to design one's own site from scratch, to use pre-fab templates or to contract with a third-party web designer ?

Curious as to people's thoughts about the whole website design process.

For myself, I am endeavoring to design my first (of several) eCommerce stores from the ground up (i.e. designing in Photoshop, slicing it up, building it in Dreamweaver, integrating the Shopping Cart, etc.) The only thing I'm not going to do is host it - even I know my own limitations. The reason I am going the "design it myself" route is because I care greatly about the initial impression, presentation and impact of my site when potential customers click onto it ("First Impressions Last"). Of course, I am "testing out" the design on others for opinions/suggestions as I progress.

The big drawback, however, to going this route (and not being a professional web designer) is that it is taking far longer than if I were to have simply used a pre-fab template or contract with a web-design service/company. The up-side, of course, is saving the money I would otherwise spend for the template and/or web design service.

- What are some of your thoughts on this process?
- How did you decide which route was the best for you?
- Knowing what you know now, would you do/have done things differently?

kabucas

The downside to templates

depending on who created the template, they may not have ever thought of the SEO part.. no just templates but most web designers themselves think if it looks pretty more people will visit.. but if the search engines can't find the site, no matter how pretty, it will only bring in word of mouth customers (which are the best kind)

Templates are also rarely optimised for all browsers...

Nothing a template can do that CSS can not.. and CSS makes it so much easier to change (granted there is a large learning curve to CSS layout and browser compatability)

The upside
Templates are nice for the less web design savy.. right out of the box..
they allow you(if it is correctly designed) to make changes to one file for the whole site.
If you are designing something from the ground up, have it noted this is largely overwhelming and many never make a complete job of the project.. But if do, think about 3 years from now.. will you be using the same template (or even the same shopping system)
Then think and look into CSS..

If you do your own design with or without a template, consider SSI.. your header in one file, your footer in another.. much easier to control the layout/design (changes) than it is to construct a bloated editable region template..

As soon my creloaded stroe becomes stable(finally happy with all the mods) I will revert it to completely CSS driven.. (sounds like a great winter project unless OSC beats me to it)

I do honor your ambitions, but it really will be a huge task... (unless you will have a small store and use paypal buttons or something simple)
The other thing is security.. you might think your design/cart is secure, but with it being only your site on a small scale, it is less likely to be hacked, but if someone does run into it, it would be easier to crack.. (1 site testing vs 1,000's of users trying to break its code)

Good luck to you,
Jason

tcraw1010 · **Date:** Tue Jun 27, 2006 4:30 pm **Subject:**

GREAT info and insight !!!

In actuality, my plan is to have an acquaintence who is a web-design/SEO professional go through the site after I am done with it. Yes, it will cost me a bit o cash . . . but it will be well worth it - especially after the money I saved designing the site myself.

P.S.S. (CSS design scares me) Sad

kabucas · **Date:** Tue Jun 27, 2006 4:55 pm **Subject:** CSS

#1 hate of web designers FRAMES
#2 TABLES (very bloated code) If you used CSS layout, even the largest cart would fly(speed wise)

If you are still unsure about CSS check out www.csszengarden.com which illustrates the separation between html and CSS and how you can customize the same content in a number of different ways just using different style sheets. (truely amazing the differnce these guys can come up with just by changing 1 file)

The other great thing.. If you decided to white box your cart code to the rest of the world.. you would have a niche market.. creating completely different sites (design side) just by editing the css (no templates needed... )

Or selling the code to a hosting company and let them handle the business side of it

Jason

tcraw1010 · **Date:** Wed Jun 28, 2006 8:29 am **Subject:**

"white box" my cart ??? Question

kabucas · **Date:** Wed Jun 28, 2006 3:56 pm **Subject:** Indeed

Just trying tohelp that Future eCommerce Millionaire get there a little faster

tcraw1010 · **Date:** Wed Jun 28, 2006 4:21 pm **Subject:**

No ... I meant I was not sure what you meant by "white box" my cart.

What does that mean ?? Embarassed

kabucas · **Date:** Wed Jun 28, 2006 9:40 pm **Subject:** white box

Take your cart.. remove everything that makes it "yours" allowing others to put in their info.. to dress it up..

pwog · **Date:** Tue Jul 04, 2006 8:56 am **Subject:** Don't let CSS scare you

Hi Tom,

You wrote

>>In actuality, my plan is to have an acquaintence who is a web-design/SEO professional go through the site after I am done with it. Yes, it will cost me a bit o cash . . . but it will be well worth it - especially after the money I saved designing the site myself.

P.S.S. (CSS design scares me)
>>

I have been using tables for design layout for years and recently started teaching myself CSS design. Don't let it scare you. If you are using DW (at least V. 8) it handles CSS pretty well. However, learning CSS will get you much further, much faster. There are some great books to speed your learning curve. Using CSS makes the code neater and more SEO friendly.

I think you would be better servered to speak with your web-design/SEO person while your design is in progress - so you don't have to do any major redesign.

Just my 2 cents - pwog

bgetting · **Date:** Tue Jul 04, 2006 9:20 am **Subject:** My two cents

I figured I would throw my two cents in here, in case it helps at all...

It sounds to me like one of the goals is to learn as well as save money on your site. I think that is great, and I would highly recommend taking the time to learn the technology that powers your website. However, a few words of caution if nobody minds.

1. I recommend being involved with your SEO/designer throughout the whole process. While it may seem like having them review the site at the end will work, that can be a double-edged sword. By keeping that person involved and reviewing your work as you go, you will be able to identify issues before they grow out of control. The worst case is that you build the entire site only to find out that one of the foundations of the site is not optimized, requiring a compete overhaul.

2. CSS design is definitely the way to go. It has more to do with data deployment and how you structure information, as opposed to simply being a different way of doing things. The idea behind the XHTML/CSS movement is that you create XHTML documents to hold your data. You then use CSS to format that data for the intended recipients. In this way, you can specify a CSS format for people viewing your site on a computer (web browser), a different format for people viewing your site on a mobile device, and even another layout for when people want to print your screen. The flexibility is there, and the code will be lean and mean so that your site will both be quick to download and search engine friendly.

3. CSS can be applied in many ways, and there is a definite "right" way to do it and a wrong way. I often see people change their code to include CSS with little or no improvement in SEO or reduction in code. It is important that if you are looking to create a CSS layout for the benefits of using CSS that it be implemented correctly. Tables shouldn't be an option for most layout techniques.

And that is my take on it, based on my experience designing and deploying websites. I think that if you are concerned about the cost of involving a web designer during the whole process, you should periodically post your code on this forum. Getting feedback at each stage can help out a lot, and with everyone on these forums involved, you have a good chance of getting some great code ideas.

Here are some articles in the magazine that deal with CSS and layout techniques, in case they help anyone out:

An Introduction to CSS
An Introduction to CSS - Part 2
An Introduction to CSS - Part 3
Optimizing HTML Code for Maximum SEO
Combining CSS and JavaScript to Save Page Space

beley · **Date:** Tue Jul 04, 2006 10:38 pm **Subject:**

I just want to throw in my two cents here as well. I don't want to beat a dead horse, but to recap:

1) CSS design - multiple benefits including SEO, speed, accessibility, etc.

2) Doing hit on SEO after design. You need to build SEO into the very fabric of the website from the ground up. SEO and conversion should be the two primary goals of the development, not the design. What the site looks like is really not important compared to whether or not it converts visitors and gets good search engine ranking.

3) Pick a good shopping cart. Some are just impossible to design a user-friendly site around. They either have horrible checkout process or their templates are so hard to use it'd take your programmer a year to get them up and running. Also be sure they are SEO friendly from the gate - it's almost impossible to take a 2nd rate shopping cart and build SEO into it after the fact.

There are some good shopping carts out there. I really like ShopSite because it's insanely easy to use and customize. The templates are so simple even someone with very little HTML knowledge can whip them up in no time. There are others too... so just look around.

I've compiled a list of e-commerce software that may be helpful:
http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=49000

Another suggestion - buy a few books on converting customers and usability. Here are some of my favorites:

Submit Now: Designing Persuasive Websites by Andrew Chak

Don't Make Me Think by Steve Krug

Defensive Design for the Web : How to improve error messages, help, forms, and other crisis points by 37 Signals

dibber · **Date:** Wed Jul 05, 2006 10:52 am **Subject:** to roll your own or to not...

I would have to agree with kabacus regarding building your own cart; even with a fair amount of programming experience it is quite an undertaking. I�ve written several dynamic sites now, but a fully functional shopping cart is a different animal.

Beley pointed to a great list of carts but the one I have decided to use after a lot of research not found in his list is CubeCart. The code is very streamline, it's incredibly easy to install, makes good use of CSS, and has a clever and easy to modify template structure. The code to text ratio is very good also. It doesn't have as big of following as say osCommerce but it does have a great community and is growing. The cart is free to use but purchasing a $70 license is required to remove the copyright in the footer; which I was happy to pay.

There are many mods for the cart and they are all very reasonably priced if not free. My first recommendation for modification would be the Search Engine Friendly Mod. It utilizes the Apache Rewrite method for your links and allows you to specify META Title, Keywords, and Descriptions for each product/category from within the existing Admin Panel. Very nice...

Okay, I didn't post to advocate CC; just trying to share Smile

One thought I have relative to the dialogue in this post is about tables and CSS. CSS is of course extremely advantageous but in my (relatively short) experience is not a solid replacement for tables. The differences in the way Internet Explorer and Firefox alone render pages have limited my use of CSS to style rather than full layout control. The combination of pure XML & CSS is a goal of mine; I�m just not there yet. I think people have had good luck with using CSS to control layout within a �master table� limiting the number of tags in the table; but even then the differences are often very noticeable between browsers. It�s a tough deal when you greatly prefer using what most of the world is not i.e. IE.

bgetting · **Date:** Wed Jul 05, 2006 10:55 am **Subject:** Apple Pie Cart

You may also want to check out Apple Pie Cart, as they boast that they are the most search engine friendly shopping cart system out there. I have seen the source code for sites using this cart, and it looks like they use a very streamlined, CSS based template system.

kabucas · **Date:** Wed Jul 05, 2006 11:20 am **Subject:** CSS layout

Brian,
I think this would be a great resource to your subscribers and site visitors.. It is a step away from e-commerce, but is in line..

Keep up the great work,
Jason

dibber · **Date:** Wed Jul 05, 2006 2:51 pm **Subject:** CSS Zen Garden

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