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Information about CMS and shopping carts

| Open Source e-commerce shopping carts and content management systems

Visual Orange >> 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

We are very often approached by clients requiring a web site based on a content management system, to be able to change or update the text. The volume of the web site consists however of just 20-30 pages. It is not recommended to use a content management system for such a small web site, there are other solutions to update text than to get an application that has a huge overhead and a complete user administration etc. Additionally consider that optimizing pages for the web is very time consuming if the system is lacking seo-modules which we often find also with open source software.

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

Advantage
Editors 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 information about a CMS and if it is recommended in your case to implement this application. Visual Orange shall provide impartial advice by e-mail or use the Chat of MS Messenger or Skype.