navigation home navigation navigation contact navigation navigation faq navigation
Information about CMS and shopping carts

| CMS and e-commerce shopping carts

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 if necessary extended to your specific requirements. 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 package from the shelf. 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, providing the functionality 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 to close the deal.

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 removing 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 addiction to programming. Commercial applications however are 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. Additionally consider that optimizing a such an application for the web is very time consuming and therefore more expensive in marketing costs compared to a good maintainable php based system.

These would be the reasons when advising against a CMS:

  • The pricing would be unnecessarily expensive for a small site.
  • The hosting would be more expensive than necessary.
  • You do not need a massive CMS to update just pure text. There are other uncomplicated tools to handle the update of text. All you need is an html editor and a ftp client to do so. Templates provide you to override the layout.
  • If you do not dare to update and upload the text altered files by yourself, Visual Orange provides web site maintenance to all clients. You can make use of this for your small web site and be looked-after professionally, (inclusive graphical work on images, they should reflect your content and should be updated too and professional software is necessary to do so).
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 50 pages and will grow with each update with the amount of the updated pages

Advantage and Draw backs of a CMS

Advantage
Editors can modify only the text and load up additional images. They cannot break anything. The look of the web site will be consistent. Templates once implemented will always stay the same.

Draw backs
  • Altering the layout will cost you additional money because new templates need to be created. Templates are rigid.
  • Not all CMS are search engine friendly because they generate database driven web pages. Visual Orange works only with search engine friendly systems.
  • Often poor quality graphics are the result because owners try to save costs on graphic design, the system then resizes images automatically. This results in bad quality or out of proportion images when not provided in all displayed sizes. By loading up the largest picture, and have it resized automatically a loss of quality is the result because the data looses pixel information and when not enhanced by sharpening or saturation the colors loose their brilliance and are displayed smudgy and jagged as thumbnails.
>> 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.