So the current marketplace I'm using is starting to seem like a bad idea. So before I go crazy with listings, I'm thinking about closing that down and pursuing other options. Namely, I want to open my own website. So I'm looking for any suggestions related to that.

In the end here's what I want on my website...
-Shopping Cart/Shopping area
-Blog
-Logically my own domain
-Ability to Customize appearance
-Easy to list/update shop

That's it. Yep, really a difficult customer aren't I? I think I know what domain/server services I want to use - GoDaddy for the domain and Dreamhost for the server. Unless I find a service that integrates both products above together for a flat rate. But I'm grasping at thing air with what I should choose for shopping cart.

So far I think I've narrowed it down to either BigCartel (which charges monthly for a set amount of listings, but since you can choose domain it looks like it might save a lot of headaches by making listing easy) or ZenCart. As for the blog I'd really like to just set up my blogspot blog up to be on the website but that isn't important. I'd rather not use wordpress if for no other reason than its really quite expensive. Anyone have other suggestions for the shopping cart?

The rest of the fun stuff...like actually coding some of the appearance...will be something I'll have to figure out after I figure out what type of shopping cart I'm looking for, and I'm not above using prebuilt stuff.

K THX.

Get a Content Management System and use either free to commercial addons for things like the shopping cart. I don't know which are good at this point; just look around for what seems to have the features you want built-in or available as plugins. Using separate software for everything typically leads to a less integrated experience, where you can't log into the shopping cart from the blog page and things along those lines. Otherwise, it requires a fair amount of tinkering with the databases and such. Or you can get lucky and there's a suite of them or something online.

That's what I'm thinking, too. Logging in three different places for the same website? Not fun. I'll check out CMS's...thanks for the tip.

The ones I know of that I'd look into are Joomla and e107, but there are a ton of them that you should look into (and I haven't paid attention to them in several years). I'd also look for reviews or whatever you can find, so you know what upsides/downsides are. And pay attention to speed, because some will likely be less efficient than others, and browsing a slow website is boring. Most are written in PHP, but there are some written in Perl, in Python, and probably stuff I don't know of. You probably don't have to worry, but make sure that whatever host you take gives you access to the language and a database (if one is necessary; usually is). I suppose that by now most paid hosts will have all of this easy, but in case you decide to get something cheap, just check this anyway.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Feb 2 2011, 10:58 pm by Centreri.

Yea I haven't used any codes in like...four years now? And that was CSS/HTML for invision free. I don't mind learning, but some of that sounds intimidating. I might be better off finding a partner in crime who knows those things.

PHP I'm pretty confident I could learn. Python/Perl sounds intimidating.

Don't try to code it on your own. If you try to write your own system without training or anything, it'll be ugly, bloated, inefficient, insecure, etc. Stick with something that's already made or get a partner in crime.

I won't write my own. By I do want to be able to trouble shoot basic problems... :\