eCommerce website design
Again, web designers can pull in a substantially larger profit from an eCommerce (shopping cart) website. The reason for this is quite simple: eCommerce websites, on an average, generate businesses much more money than a basic informational website. So they’re worth more to the company!
To maximize your profit, and to minimize your (and your clients’) costs, you can use a variety of free shopping cart solutions. I prefer AgoraCart. It is slightly harder to work with initially (as compared to ZenCart and OSCommerce), but it is extremely flexible and has amazing support in both the free forums and paid (Pro) forums. I receive responses to questions within a few hours – most days. AgoraCart does require quite a bit more programing before it’s SEO-friendly (each category page requires a custom header to be hard-coded into the design if you want custom META tags). The design options are endless though. Take a PSD template, for example, and slice it up into 4-5 sections (Header, Footer, Body, Left Nav, and (if desired) Right Nav). You can then apply these sections to the AgoraCart files. It’s quite simple once you get going. I believe the language used is AJAX? I do not know the language AT ALL, but with my HTML knowledge… and general common-sense, I’ve been able to design some beautiful websites using this seemly complex software.
Another alternative, which I have yet to experiment much with, is WordPress with an eCommerce plugin and/or theme.
Hands-down… WordPress is the easiest platform to use & install. If you are not that great with programming… but want to try it all on your own – WordPress it up! My hosting solution, Dot5Hosting.com, uses cPanel and a click-to-install WordPress blog (and AgoraCart for that matter).
For the client to have ultimate control over his/her website, install a CMS in addition to the shopping cart. Yes, even the FREE shopping carts have a semi-CMS (which allows the client to easily add/edit/delete products), but editing/adding/deleteing content pages is not widely supported among the free eCommerce solutions. Thus… install WordPress, Joomla, or the like along with your Cart!
I’d like to talk about WordPress as a CMS in my next post.
October 1st, 2011 at 8:30 pm
Thank you for the sensible critique. Me & my neighbor were just preparing to do a little research on this. We got a grab a book from our area library but I think I learned more from this post. I’m very glad to see such wonderful information being shared freely out there.
January 4th, 2012 at 3:00 am
Awesome website…
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January 9th, 2012 at 4:45 am
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