ShopFactory Developer v5

First website

[lilythepink]

Greetings - and help! Just beginning to build my very first ecommerce site which will have 5,000 products in many categories - has anyone used the ShopFactory Developer V5 software? Is it really as easy to use as I'm lead to believe and is it reliable? I know nothing about html etc - our current site was built by a website company.

Any feedback is very much appreciated - Cheers!

[pmac]

Hi lilythepink and welcome [webmasterworld.com] to WebmasterWorld.

It has been years since I used Shop Factory, I remember it as being very slow loading as it was really code heavy (java) and the layout of the site would be in frames with no ability to change it.

[PCInk]

I used ShopFactory version 4 and was not impressed. Version 5 looks poor too, so I have custom written scripts for the cart and other pages too. Templates are too restrictive as well-the templates on version 4 needed modification to work with both IE6 and NS7, then causing a failure with NS4-all I wanted was a hopping cart not a full blown javascript (and buggy) shopping cart (I don't think any javascript shopping cart will pass the test of time-each browser and version of browser runs javascript slightly differently).

[JamesR]

Dreamweaver is a popular program for a layout as opposed to code approach. Many top pros here use that program and love it.

[lilythepink]

Thanks very much for your help everyone - from the comments so far ShopFactory Developer v5 does not look good. Shame, as I was hoping [dreaming?] that shop building software had perhaps taken a big leap in quality and ease of use [ perhaps like DOS being too difficult for Joe Average but window's easy to use/understand interface had him buying millions of computers]
Is there a single shop building program that can do it all by just simple point and click yet works well, is stable, loads quickly etc or is such a thing some time off yet?