What do I need to know to my high end retail sales site off the ground?

July 15, 2008 12:46 PM

What are the best books/sites for learning the necessary web design and dev tools for an e-commerce site?

I have a decent graphic and web design background, but I haven't used it in nine years or so, which means I never quite grasped CSS.

What books/sites/languages can you recommend so that I can design and build a website for direct sales? I will be selling very few (3-5) products that come in several colors. I want to be able to add to them, but I will hire a firm once the number gets too high, so right now it doesn't need to have a complicated database to accommodate high volume of inventory. This is a fashion product so I want the design to be cute and stylish, but easy for customers to navigate and buy products.

My thoughts are to use something like Dreamweaver for design and then program in the e-commerce parts myself. (Do people still even use the term e-commerce?)

I basically need it to look very high end and have a shopping cart with multiple payment and shipping options. I'm confident I can do this myself and have been thoroughly unimpressed with the web pros I've tried to work with. I think I can figure it out on my own for less money and time. However, I don't want to pore through textbooks and do tutorials on things that are unnecessary to get this site off the ground.

Also, I'd like to design and program regular emailings to alert my customer base of new products and availability.

I hope this is specific enough to make sense. Thanks!

posted by JJ Jenkins to computers & internet (5 comments total)

I cannot recommend Lynda.com enough. At $25 a month, there isn't a much better value. You will find many programs on there that will benefit you and your project. They have tutorials on CSS, Dreamweaver, CSS+Dreamweaver, e-commerce, web development and you can also brush up on your design skills while you're at it. Each tutorial program is broken down by chapter and topic so you can watch only the ones that you specifically need. IMHO, you can learn fairly quickly on Lynda.com, too.
posted by bristolcat at 12:58 PM on July 15

What books/sites/languages can you recommend
That sounds like you might end up working in an unfamiliar language. If that's the case, I think you're probably better off plugging in an off-the-shelf cart system rather than rolling your own.


I think I can figure it out on my own for less money and time.
You can save money, for sure, but the alternative is not necessarily hiring someone to do it for you. You can buy a pre-built component and just do configuration and look & feel customization. It's hard to beat that time-wise.
posted by juv3nal at 2:58 PM on July 15

I just finished working through the book Dreamweaver 8 from Lynda / Hands On Training and found it excellent in refreshing my HTML and learning CSS from scratch. Except that the book itself fell apart from intense use, the materials were informative & well-paced. You'd probably want something additional to complete an e-commerce site, because that book covers design and you'd need programming too. But, dittoing juv3nal, use something prebuilt for that part.
posted by anadem at 3:24 PM on July 15

Gotta tell you, the site design/coding aspect of it pales in comparison to the SEO/marketing side. Like bristolcat, I think you might be best-off looking for a managed service that you can point a domain name to. I don't have a recommendation; but I spent far too much time tweaking an e-commerce application when I should have been concentrating on SEO.
posted by Leon at 6:01 AM on July 16

(misread bristolcat's suggestion - sorry about that).
posted by Leon at 6:02 AM on July 16