Standard brochureware site with shopping carts?

[Mark_A]

I have been asking for quotes for a 200 page products site with perhaps 150-200 products needing shopping carts on the product pages.

I am asking for quotes including some kind of CMS and also quotes with the site built as a standard html site.

One suggestion has been to put the whole site into Magento, is that not just a bit overkill? I mean it only needs some shopping carts on the pages or am I being dumb?

[enigma1]

If you plan to sell online and have payment options you should be looking for an e-commerce package. There are addonss for content management and you shouldn't need to use a separate cms.

You can check oscommerce, is tiny and simple to setup and customize with a plethora of addons and works with every hosting environment.

[Mark_A]

Hi enigma1, so are you saying it is not advisable or possible even just to add a shopping cart to standard html pages and have a site which can take orders.

Does this mean that if I have product pages they cannot end in .htm anymore and have to have a new ending?

[lorax]

The issue with using htm pages is that unless you run your htm pages through a script engine like PHP (eg have the htm pages processed so that any PHP code within them is executed) then they are static pages >> no dynamic displays of product feeds or other script dependent functionality.

This doesn't mean that you can't put an image and a link on them that feeds your cart. It simply means the ease of maintenance is severely reduced.

How many static pages are you looking to build?

[Mark_A]

How many static pages are you looking to build?

Probably 150 - 170

[enigma1]

Mark_A, e-commerce packages including the one I mentioned have addons to generate pages that end with HTML. You have an admin panel from where you can insert products, prices, assign products to categories etc and the htm or whatever extension links are virtual handled by a couple of physical files. Depending on the add-on you maybe able to keep the exact links that you have now preserving your SEO.

The hard part with the individual static pages that you have now is to setup the products to sell. So even if you setup a form to send to paypal say, you need to have some dynamic script to put the prices, models product options etc. from a template. And then if you decide to change something you have to edit HTML code directly.

IMO check first the admin part of osc and see if it suits your needs. Its open source anyways.

[Mark_A]

Hi again enigma1, I do feel I should probably try to maintain existing urls to pages on the site so there is some continuety where SEs are concerned.

I now have some quotes for the new site and some want a lot of money for SEO and promotion after the site build. It just suggests to me that initially at least the site will not do well in the SEs. It stinks.