About two years ago, I had a go at
commercial web site design. I put a medium-sized ad
in a London classified ad paper. Nothing fancy: "Web
designer seeks work ..." etc. This was expensive,
about £500 for a month's run.
Got a few replies. Lesson number one: advertise where
clients of the calibre you want will see it. The clients
I got thought £300 was a lot for a web site. They
didn't want to pay web hosting. They wanted a lot of
bang for their buck. 'Mission creep' was a term I grew
to know and loathe.
This set me thinking: how could I give these people
all they could ever want, but not spend a lot of time
and money? Lately, I realised how.
So how can you get a full featured site up in a day?
Easy (ish!).
1. Mambo Content Management System http://www.mambo.com
I wish I'd found this software a couple of years
ago. It's freeware. The default set-up allows people
without web design skills to update the site. It has
a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) option. This
adds HTMLArea code to text input form fields. Each
HTML code input box becomes a mini HTML editor.
If you can use Microsoft Word, you can add formatted
HTML code to the site.
To get it running you need to know how to install
MySQL databases, or have PHPMyAdmin as part of your
web-hosting package.
You can add articles, edit them, send emails to members,
and be contacted by users.
The only criticisms I have of this software
are:
1. The admin interface is confusing.
It's all there, just finding and using it is the problem!
2. You need to search around template sites to find
ones suited to your site purpose. I wanted simple,
clean, business ones. Most of those available seem
to have a fat graphic which covers half the screen.
There are more restrained ones out there.
These are minor gripes, compared to the relief of
finding what is essentially a web site in a box. It
can be installed in an hour, once you get familiar
with it.
To add ecommerce to your site:
Oscommerce Shopping Cart http://www.oscommerce.com
Again, this is a full-featured, freeware software.
You can add lots of freeware 'plug-ins' to it, to
get a professional shopping cart.
Therein lies the danger. Some of these plug-ins require
altering or overwriting the default cart files. When
you try to upgrade the cart version later, you may
'break' it, by overwriting a plug-in, thus creating
errors.
The trick here is to only install plug-ins that add
files (rather than overwrite them) or that require
minor alterations to existing files.
What I do is download all the versions of the plug-in
type I need e.g. a WYSIWYG editor. I then choose the
one which has the least files, or which creates a
new directory for its files. If it requires that important
files be overwritten, or is complex, I chuck it.
Mambo and Oscommerce. Don't try to integrate them!
Hyperlink from one to the other. I've tried integrations
of other softwares, like PhpBB and PhpNuke. Fine,
when it works, but when you upgrade one or the other,
arrgh!
*Keep databases separate*. If one goes skew-whiff,
then at least the other will still work. Same goes
for adding chat rooms and the like. If they're all
running off the one database, and that database becomes
corrupted ...
It may offend your sense of tidiness for your visitors
to have to sign up twice at your site, but you'll
thank me for this sage advice later. Remember KISS
is the basic rule of computing (Keep It Simple, Stupid!).
About the author:
T. O' Donnell (http://www.tigertom.com) is an ecommerce
consultant and curmudgeon living in London, UK. His
latest project is an ebook on conservatories, available
at http://www.ttconservatories.co.uk.T. O' Donnell
freeware may be downloaded at http://www.ttfreeware.co.uk.
