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I have never used a CMS before nor have I built a E-commerce site before so I have several questions regarding this and choosing one:
My background:
I am not a programmer: I am a designer and I am proficient with using HTML and CSS, as well as having some experience using and "tweeking" some Jquery Plugins such as sliders, picture viewers, to use in my markup.
I need help choosing the right CMS to build a E-commerce site for a very small shop and my choice of CMS must meet these requirements:
1) most important: the site must do some sort of automatic SEO for the products added using the names of the products, ie "poster of michael jackson".
2) most important #2: The website doesn't have to keep stats on a million things or have a million random features but the products we will be selling on this site MUST have a second level of variables to go with their choice. ie when the the buyer chooses to purchase the "michael jackson poster" - then they must be able to choose the "poster frame style" and see the choices in thumbnails for example of what these frames look like (wood, plastic, metal) and also other options such as "poster glass choice" with several types of glass to choose as variables
3) It has a very easy to use backend for my client (who knows nothing about websites) to update content.
4) Something I can set up without being a programmer given my skill set listed above. I can purchase or use a free template to get started but i'd like to eventually be able to stylize the site myself to give it my own theme/look and front end UI features such as a picture slide show or something I want to build/plugin that may not be part of the template.
Thanks in advance! I'm very very new to this stuff.
p.s. i was looking at magento, is that a good one for these requirements?
one option is an all-in-one hosted system like shopify, volusion, corecommerce, or yahoo stores. you can totally customize the design, but they handle the e-commerce engine and have seo compatibility... magento is excellent and is very customizable.
Exact Abacus offer Ecommerce software that seems to tick all your boxes. Its probably unlike anything you've seen before, so definitely worth a look.
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Say I am required to build an E-Commerce website that could eventually become very very large. The site would start with at least 100,000 different products, and would include features like Amazon. Would you advise me to use a CMS? or to build this website from ground up?
Something to take into consideration is that if I use a CMS, there would still need to be lots of custom coding, since we want many features not commonly available.
Taking into consideration factors such as Speed, Security and Scalability.
Features would include: Different sets of details for different products, product comparisons, reviews, customer management, customer points system, and all the basic ecommerce features.
If you say CMS, Can you also suggest CMS's that would be great for this kind of store.
Thank you.
Well you have to consider many things. in general means, using CMS is good idea.It reduce development time as well as development cost. But you may need to make modifications on source code in order to gain what exactly you want from it. On the other hand build such application from scratch allows you to obtain exactly what you want. but its will takes time as well as much cost.
follow through bellow link
http://www.mykeblack.com/web-design/how-much-does-an-ecom-website-cost
and also if you choose an FOSS CMS find something has higher community involvement as well as support.
If you use paypal as payment method , check their web site. they suggest couple of good commercial CMS.
The ideal e-commerce solution for that volume would be Magento
The only downfall is that its very robust and has a steep learning curve. I do NOT recommend using a framework that is a blogging site first, with an e-commerce plugin or add-on such as WordPress. It will not be able to support the traffic, the product volume, or the security precautions that should be taken.
Obviously is better if you use a CMS, I recommend you OpenCart if you just want to do an E-Commerce web site, it's is so simple and Open Source.
For something bigger you can try Joomla as CMS and a great extension called VirtueMart (http://virtuemart.net)[3], it's very complete an extensible..
Any time you use pre-made code, you are at the mercy of the features included. Adding features can be significantly harder than with custom code.
That having been said, it is definitely not unheard of to START your site with pre-made code (or even a whole platform - like selling via Amazon) and only the included features so you can start making revenue while you write your own solution.
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I want to choose a CMS that will be part of my infrastructure for my company websites.
What do you think are the questions I need to ask before I really choose one?
Choosing a CMS is almost like choosing a framework.
Thanks
Your two starting questions should be about people:
Who will be building and maintaining the technology? If your organisation's IT department is in love with Microsoft solutions, then find the best .NET CMS that meets your needs (Umbraco, Kentico, DotNetNuke etc). If you have no money but you're fairly IT-savvy and have a couple of Web designers on tap to help you out, then a designer-friendly free system like MODX Revolution makes sense. If some of your people have worked with a big system like Drupal, then that's your leading candidate.
Who will be adding content to the system? Internal users will want an interface that rewards use - it must react fast, protect the user from losing their work, make content easy to find, and ease tasks like creating new pages and including links and images. That might push you towards CMS Made Simple, or even WordPresss if your needs are otherwise modest. And if most of the content will be contributed by a user community, the CMS must support a strong forum capability.
After that, take a look at Step Two's document How to evaluate a content management system. These guys know their stuff. You may even want to buy their Content Management Requirements Toolkit. Their evaluation document gives you a starting point for your evaluation.
Do bear in mind, though, that not all requirements are created equal. For instance, many CMS texts stress the importance of complex workflow and versioning. In large publishing businesses, these sometimes matter a lot. In most smaller organisations they don't matter as much. Your workflow may consist of one person putting content into the system and another approving it to go live - the sort of task that can be accomplished with a staging server and email. Versioning may be adequately covered by a regular back-up.
And remember above all that when you put a CMS in an existing organisation, you're engaging in politics. You need to find out what people want, show you're delivering it, explain to them the considerations which they don't know about but which have to be taken into account, and convince them you're acting to bring them the best possible tool. Good luck.
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I am looking to help out a non-profit get a website up and running.
Only, they don't just want a website with content, they also want to maintain a database of members, and allow those members to register and pay for classes/events/seminars held by the club.
It seems to me, that if all they wanted was to post content, nearly any of the available CMS's out there would fit the bill.
But the registration portion would require some customization.
I have considered just installing a basic CMS for them, and then creating separate web application for the registration section. And this would still work...
But if I wanted to hook into the users/roles from the CMS and use them in the registration side, I think I would have to have some way of either extending the CMS or easily using it's data in the sub-application.
I have been reading about the following CMS's:
Orchard
Umbraco
C1 Composite
All of them seem to have the ability to be extended, but I'm not certain how much "work" is involved to extend each. Given that my requirements are rather simple and the fact that I don't want to spend a ton of time doing this (it is free work, after all), does anyone have a recommendation?
I'd pass on Umbraco and C1 Composite, as they generally aren't user-friendly. I think Orchard is best, as it has the best feedback of them all. Umbraco is aimed more at developers who want to tweak a lot of things.
Orchard - https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1978360/anybody-using-orchard-cms
Link - Reviews/Comparison of Open Source ASP.NET MVC CMS
Umbraco would be a very good choice because it:
is mature and has a proven track record.
is very easy to use for most use cases.
has a built-in member system which could (and should) be used for the member registration.
has a Big and friendly community always glad to help out.
has lots of plugins and extensions covering some special use cases.
If you will go outside of .NET and IIS, Joomla is another popular CMS in LAMP. This can be hosted in either Unix or Win environments. There's a large community, lots of implementations and robust API for plugins. I run it on MAMP on my Mac, and it also runs on WAMPServer, for development.
Last year I created a membership style site in Joomla using Mighty Extensions for a bed and breakfast listing service (http://uurehome.com). Mighty User and Membership was enough, this adds custom user fields and subscription plans. You do have to pay for Mighty Extensions. Payment for the B&B listings is done thru Paypal, Mighty Membership enables this.
The subscription plan feature is Mighty Membership is very good. You can have length of time, cost renewals, renewal nag messages. Could have written myself, but why at this cost :-)
Joomla can certainly handle the community side of a non-profit site, there's the usual assortment of content, discussions, news feeds and so on. It's also ok for mere mortals to administer.
Not so sure about comparing to Orchard, as I haven't kicked the tires on Orchard. I have done enterprise web CMS for a living in the past, so I am used to evaluating these sorts of products. Orchard looks similar to Joomla in how it works, based on the screenshots I see in the docs. One thing I will say with confidence is that it's easier to standup Joomla (or something LAMP/WAMP/MAMP) than on the MS Webmatrix. However, if you already have a Webmatrix provider, then it's similar. Said by someone that has done a bunch of IIS and pretty much all the web technologies going back to the beginning of time (that's 1993).
Another aspect of using Joomla for me in this project, which is for a small business, was knowing that there's a bunch of Joomla knowledgable web design shops this owner could use if I stop helping her. While I am not going to say there isn't a base of folks doing web design that are doing Orchard, my sense is that its much smaller than Joomla. This is a factor for me in helping non-profits, churches and so on, not leaving them in a place where I am the "only" person that could keep whatever it is running. Still, if there's even a couple of local web design shops that do Orchard, I'd say that's enough to feel comfortable.
We built http://aclj.org on Orchard with a custom membership implementation within to support millions of members. We do form processing through Kimbia for donations and petition signatures. We're very happy with the implementation and feel that Orchard worked out well for us as a platform. It is VERY extensible and we developed 32 custom modules in-house.
For a non profit organization it is unlikely to maintain a costly server where LAMP stack has both low cost server and some decent CMS which meets your requirements perfectly. Some of them are :
Drupal
Joomla
WordPress
Any of them are highly extensible, got a great community support , plenty of themes and modules readily available and you can get awesome things for free though there are some paid once too.
And if you want my recommendation i would go for Drupal as it provides :
Build in role management service.
Very matured and friendly community.
Great scalabilty.
Secured out of the box
And some more .......
Hope that adds a new dimension to your search :)
Best of luck
I would recommend wordpress for your requirement.
Advantages:
1. More forum support.
2. Easy to learn.
3. Very less server cost to host the site.
4. You will have N number of plugins and widgets etc...
Hope It gives some sense :)
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I'm looking for companies that allow white labeling/reselling of portals/CMS that are focused on ecommerce, or could be configured to include ecommerce.
A possible example is a company that provides white labeling of Drupal with Ubercart.
We have two service offerings we are looking at providing based on white label providers.
1) Our company is a service provider assisting the client to create an individual site
Our company assists client in creating a portal/site for their offerings on our branded site,(our site would use the while label service as well) but ideally, the client site could be branded for the client. (this is probably subject to the platform that is being offered by the white label provider)
2) Our company is a reseller of the white label service, under our brand
Our company resells the white label services, with our company adding value. Client gets their own instance, under their brand.
On the tech side we are looking to benefit from someone else dealing with version upgrades, availability, scalability etc; hence the research on white label providers.
Update
To be clear I'm looking for a company to deal with all of the infrastructure side of things; including the software.
After looking into this on and off, I'm discovered there doesn't seem to be a lot of 'white label ecommerce' offerings under that title. However, there are applications like Magento that support multisite with theme's. Presumably you can create a full sub domain and skin it to brand it.
This approach may or may not be a good fit though. One particular functionality that seems to be missing is the ability to allow self registration and create of a site. This to me is the holy grail of white lableing. The closest I've come to that functionality is Aegir in the Drupal ecosystem or Drupal Commons with it's organic groups.
However, the situation is different for white label social networking. This seems like a much more mature industry. Perhaps the approach is to use social networking white labeling with an ecommerce plug in.
Bottom line is that I haven't found a turn key platform that allows a power user level of functionality. Hopefully it will come about soon!
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I am looking to revamp our CRUD web forms and would appreciate any examples of good UI design.
We have lots of database tables that have minimal editing needs by the user - Country Codes, Tax codes, Product prices, and so on - and these all currently use a simple format for CRUD, but it was designed by developers and looks very bland, and quite possibly could have far better usability, and certainly a better design.
Our process is:
Find screen - which also has an ADD NEW button. Enter values for any parameters relevant to search for and press FIND button. Matching records displayed in a grid with an EDIT link. The corresponding Edit form allows CLONE, DELETE and SAVE.
Where appropriate an Edit form may display Child Records.
For very complex records / relationships the Edit form is replaced by a Record Card, which displays everything including the kitchen sink! and appropriate records / sub records have EDIT links.
Its functional, but uninspiring.
On an 80:20 basis the code is all mechanically generated, so re-generating it for a new metaphor shouldn't be too hard.
I like a lot of the UI in the Magento eCommerce Admin pages, but I would be interested in any other examples you can recommend
Here are some examples of UI patterns:
Input Controls
Stacked Tabs
Inline Input Adder
One Page Wizards
Overlay
Generally each section will explain the pattern, how and why to use, and gives a handful of graphics as real world examples.
As an additional resource, you can also visit ThemeForest's admin template site and browse through their many products and get pictures and live tours of very well designed and styled admin pages. I personally have used a few of these templates for data heavy sites.
Hope these help you out some.
7/25/18 Update: While it is hard to keep links from nine years ago working, it seem that the website which hosted the UI examples is now gone. Read Farewell from Patternry for further information.
Links worth a look:
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/04/17/web-form-design-modern-solutions-and-creative-ideas/
http://somerandomdude.com/articles/design/form-design/
The Dynamic Data Web Site that you can create using .Net 3.5 is pretty handy. Good clean dynamic CRUD ability and yet very customizable. Routing makes it possible to default to generated pages when needed and custom pages if you choose to create them.
Dynamic Data Web Site
These guys have really nice examples-
http://wufoo.com/gallery/
To me, the Django admin interface is a good example of a CRUD interface.
I've just stumbled onto this one
there you will find a couple of REALLY GREAT templates!!!
http://www.webappers.com/2009/09/18/20-professional-web-admin-templates-on-themeforest/