What to use to create simple site with ability to take customer orders?

sallywin

Hey all,

I'd like to learn how to make a simple but nice looking website to sell a product online and so I would need to incorporate an e-commerce element so that I can take orders online.

In the past I used mambo web design but only to update content and apart from that I have no experience.

What would you recommend me to learn to get the skills to do this? Dreamweaver, Frontpage, or mambo/jumla? I'm willing to put some hours into learning but do want to keep it as simple as I can but don't want to end with a shabby site or anything.

JD RoX

Why do you consider Dreamweaver a skill? It's a tool - coding is a skill. Start with basic html and css, move to jQuery and php.
You won't have to put hours into it, it's more like months and years - eCommerce is one of the hardest.

Your alternative options are:
Buy a ready made template ( http://www.themeforest.net )

Create a free shopping cart website. But lets face it - they don't attract any customers.

Hire a specialist - there are good coders around here, somebody might help you out for less than agency would charge

sallywin

Fair enough re. Dreamweaver being a tool vs. a skill.

Would you recommend Joomla then? I remember mambo had a shopping cart thing. To be honest I have just one product to sell and don't know really how much I could earn from it so I can't afford big outlays. It therefore has to be DIY. I was trying to avoid learning html, css, etc. and get a good wysiwyg, what you see is what you get.

Any recommendations for that?

JD RoX

If you're selling only one product, why do you need a shopping cart? You might as well create an ordinary website for advertisement purposes and provide links to eBay.

Then you could use your wysiwyg - only skill you would need is photoshop, to design the layout.

I used BlueVoda - it seems to be free until you try to upload a website, turns out you have to host with them, but that's only like 6 dollars per month.

If it's just one or two page website, somebody here might help you out just for advertisement purposes, it's not that big of a deal... And if you're stuck for a design, I might do a freebie for you out of boredom

sallywin

Very helpful JD, thanks a mil. Good suggestion there about ebay and it would probably be a lot easier than managing it myself from the website where i'm guessing things could go wrong.. then again, it could look a little sad having just the option of buying it on ebay couldn't it?

Okay, so no simple way to incorporate a handy e-commerce facility to a simple site?

Sync

sallywin wrote: »

Very helpful JD, thanks a mil. Good suggestion there about ebay and it would probably be a lot easier than managing it myself from the website where i'm guessing things could go wrong.. then again, it could look a little sad having just the option of buying it on ebay couldn't it?

Okay, so no simple way to incorporate a handy e-commerce facility to a simple site?

Artisteer + Joomla... you can get a Joomla plugin then for the e-commerce part of things..

(Alternatively, instead of artisteer, just download a custom joomla template... thousands of free ones online)

sallywin

Sync wrote: »

Artisteer + Joomla... you can get a Joomla plugin then for the e-commerce part of things..

(Alternatively, instead of artisteer, just download a custom joomla template... thousands of free ones online)

Cheers Sync, are the plugins for the e-commerce okay to manage for people with no web design knowledge/skills? i have used mambo few years ago now on a very basic level but didn't do anything with the e-commerce bit, though it was on the site of the company I worked for.

Can you recommend specific plugins? Will check out artiseer for sure.

chakotha

Shopify is the easiest option. You probably won't learn much about web development though.

Sync

sallywin wrote: »

Cheers Sync, are the plugins for the e-commerce okay to manage for people with no web design knowledge/skills? i have used mambo few years ago now on a very basic level but didn't do anything with the e-commerce bit, though it was on the site of the company I worked for.

Can you recommend specific plugins? Will check out artiseer for sure.

Yeah they are handy enough to setup, you will find many tutorial videos online too... so if your only selling a few products it would be fine...

http://extensions.joomla.org/extensions/e-commerce

Loads of them here, I used tienda, found it easy to setup / manage.

cormee

Have a look at http://templatic.com/ecommerce-themes/store/ as well. Nice looking theme, ideal for a small shop.

pflat

Get yourself a free template and a paypal buy now button.