Recommendations for Webstore

I have a client who needs a webstore built. I am great at visual design (Photoshop, HTML, CSS) but in terms of functionality - well let’s just say I could use a little education. The majority of his sales come from Amazon.com but I find their webdesigner to be horrifically confusing and difficult to navigate so I’ve decided to write the code from scratch.

I can get a visual website up and running no problem but I have no experience in adding forums to a website, and I have absolutely no idea how to implement a system for him to easily update new products, description, info, photos. He doesn’t want the hassle of calling me to update the code to put in new products or doing it himself. Is Joomla something we should look into getting?

I’m looking suggestions…
Thanks

Alex

If you gave us some more information, that would be great and it would make it easier for us to answer your question. :slight_smile:

You say it’s a webshop, but you also mention Amazon and forums? And what language are you writing this in?

If you’re doing it with Joomla, it’s not from scratch. But I wouldn’t suggest writing a webshop from scratch unless you’ve got some specific requirements anyway. If you’re using PHP, I would either look at Magento or a solution with Drupal (they have a module called Ubercart that may be interesting.)

Magento (which I use for my own shop) is very powerful though and requires a bit of resources from your server, and it can be difficult for a newbie to “get into”. On the other hand, it’s super-packed with excellent features by default, and has a great community. Drupal, like Joomla, is a CMS that can be adapted to become a webshop as well. Why Drupal instead of Joomla? Well, it’s just my personal preference to be honest.

If you’re doing this in Ruby (which I’ve converted to using since the last 6 months), there’s a nice platform called Spree Commerce that is very lightweight and easy to build your own stuff on top of. And of course, you can always roll your own solution with a framework like Rails or Sinatra to get everything exactly like you want it. My latest site I built with Sinatra, and it’s fantastic.

But it really depends on the specifications regarding your projects, so tell us as much as you can and we’ll be able to answer you more accurately. :slight_smile:

Hey thanks for the quick reply. He has an Amazon.com account where the majority of his sales are being made on. Right now he’d like me to get a Amazon.com storefront website setup for him, and that’s where I’m running into difficulty because it’s confusing as hell and there are so many rules and restrictions as to where certain modules are allowed to me move to and where they are not allowed to be moved to. Like the search bar that comes with a template…it is not allowed to be moved here, but it can be placed here or there…

I’m only using this storefront because he wants it that way, which is fine…honestly I’d like to be able to build the site with HTML and CSS (which is all I really know), and find modules to plug into the site such as a forum and shopping cart.