Hello,
I’m starting a business that’s part of the share economy. More or less like airbnb dot com for camera equipment. Obviously, the website is a huge part of the equation. As I’ve looked around for someone to build the site I’ve gotten a lot of responses that seem to fall into 2 categories. Developers that want to code it from scratch and others that want to use templates and then build it from there adding on the specific functions I need. These needs include phone and credit card verification, users emailing each other through the site, searching for products by item and location, creating a template for people to list their item, paying for the item plus adding it together with any accessories that are rented. I take a small fee and the rest of the money is turned over to the owner. It also must take a deposit that is refunded once the item is returned. I confess that I do not understand the nuts and bolts of how to build a site or how to accomplish any of this functionality. However, I understand this is a lot. After looking at your site there seems to be a lot of very smart people on this site that may be able to assess and give their opinion of the differences. Obviously people that want to code from scratch want a kings ransom for this and the templates are significantly cheaper. So my questions are will I have to sacrifice functionality to save money. Then its not worth it. Can you add on the functions I need if using pre built templates? People have mentioned expressionengine and joomla. As the business grows will the templates become overloaded and I’ll have problems in the future. Being that a lot of these sites have a very similar look and feel I’m not especially worried about having a totally unique looking site. Any other thoughts or advice would be completely appreciated. Obviously, anybody I talk to that wants build it wants to sell me their way is best. Hopefully here I can get some opinions of people that are knowledgeable and don’t have a horse in the race. Please forgive me if this is to long a post. I just want to give as much info as possible. I