| Open Source e-commerce shopping carts and content management
systems
>> designs the graphical interface for your cms or e-commerce
shopping cart, loyal to it's brand personality. Installs the cms or
shopping cart at the web server and configures the application to
serve your needs. The database is installed and upgraded with the
modules you require. Security holes will be fixed. The web design
will then be implemented into the templates of the cms or shopping
cart, content and products will be added and your web site can go
live.
Open source versus commercial shopping carts
Based on our experience, there is no advantage buying a commercial
shopping cart if you can only afford to spend around 3000,- Euro
for a commercial cms or shopping cart web site. We worked with
commercial software and Open Source software based on PHP. Most
often these commercial shopping carts are based on the
>> smarty template engine or other similar frameworks that provide
the functionality and engine which is only modified a bit here and
there. This is funny as Smarty is also an Open Source project.
Lurked by marketing slogans and the very often lacking knowledge of
entrepreneurs going online, it is possible for commercial shopping
cart manufacturers in the low price category, to close the deal for
an application that has even one huge disadvantage: modules to
expand the functionality of the e-commerce application are not
available to the degree the open source community has on offer.
Open Source shopping carts very often provide an integrated
automatic upgrade system which simplifies the update of files. Bugs
are removed regularly, as there is a whole community reporting them
and also removing and fixing them. Development of these Open Source
applications is mostly advanced and do not lack any functionality
when compared to the commercial shopping carts.
There is a large group of developers working on the Open Source
project to create an advanced application out of zest and the
fascination of programming. Commercial applications in the low
price category are however restricted to a number of persons
working in a company, testing for bugs is a time consuming matter
and many bugs stay hidden for quite some while. Modifying and
fixing files is often for us impossible because they are compiled
or encoded and bugs sit there for months and we can do nothing
about it. Upgrades are not as often, and the service and
cooperation with their programmers takes extreme amount of time and
is therefore additionally costly.
| Content Management Systems
These would be the reasons when advising against a CMS:
- The pricing would be unnecessarily expensive for a small site to
develop it in XHTML, css and fixed templates would be cheaper and
save you around 750 Euro.
- When no regular updates are planned that expand the site with each
update by a number of pages.
- When you do not add more than 1 page per month.
When does Visual Orange recommend a CMS:
- When you have daily or weekly updates of the content of several
pages. Like articles, announcements etc.
- When several editors need to log on to the web site to update the
content, their location can be remote or from your office.
- When the web site has a minimum of 40 pages and will grow with each
update and the update is regularly.
- When you want to add pages regularly.
Advantage and Draw backs of a CMS
AdvantageEditors can modify only the text and load up additional images they
are restricted. They cannot break anything. The look of the web
site will be consistent. Templates once implemented will always
stay the same.
Pitfalls of using CMS systems- Changing the layout will cost you additional money because new
templates need to be created. Templates are rigid to safe guard the
lay-out and the formatting of content.
- Not all CMS are search engine friendly because they generate
database driven web pages. Visual Orange works only with search
engine friendly systems, if you buy a cms prior to talking with us
and we find that it will not be to your benefit to use it we will
decline the project and tell you so.
- Unprofessional maintenance can destroy the work and diminish the
successful launch of the web site.
Low quality images ignoring the original image size can cause a
chaotic lay out. Changes of settings of the systems create
inconsistency - note that: being a web designer is a highly
qualified job that cannot be accomplished successfully by people
that have not a sound understanding of how the system works or how
to produce optimized sharp images. At least graphical knowledge is
necessary to maintain the high quality status of a web site.
>> Contact us when you require more inf
