Fizheuer Zieheuer wrote:
SimonM_89 wrote:
I'm designing/developing my first website so far. It's a baby boutique website that I'm doing for my sister.
It's going quite well ATM, but I was wandering whats the best cart/payment method system to use. So far there's a gallery for the products (just using one off of dynamic drive at the minute, but I do plan on building one myself once I get used to CSS a bit more) and if you click on an image, a new window opens showing a bigger product picture & the information, through html.
There's also a button that links to a form for custom orders. So far there's nothing for payment on any of the pages, just some order & customer information (address, name, quantity etc). So I was wandering what to do payment wise: incorporate a Google Checkout or PayPal cart, or develop a database myself. My Database skills where quite good in college, but we didn't do much MySQL. If I did do a database, using some combination of MySQL & PHP & perhaps a bit of XML, I'm not sure what I need to be aware of Legally & Financially, if anything. Haven't done E-Commerce in a bit either.
To be honest - and without wanting to sound like a patronizing dick - I really don't think you have enough experience to develop an ecommerce system. Apart from the complexity of developing software allowing you to manage hundreds of different little things, you need to consider how you're going to store data securely and run a stable application that won't kill your server under load... I would suggest looking into the various open source options out there, like
Magento (even if it is a beast, poorly documented, and something of a mindfuck at first glance.) And I should know - I've been project lead on two ecommerce frameworks. It's NOT easy :< Alternatively, reading your post back - yeah, you could keep it simple and just do product/category/order management on your side, and process payments through Google or PayPal or something.
Cheers for the advice, think I'm going to do a standard database with the stock and such in it on my side in Access or whatever, & then just put the payments through paypal.
This has got me wondering though, I wouldn't mind turning this site into more of an e-commerce site, so what
would I need to know and do? As I mentioned, my Database skills aren't that bad, top marks in college for any Database unit I did. MySQL I haven't had the chance to do much as the last time I did it was a few classes at the end of college on it. PHP is much of the same due to lack of access to a server to see the results.
SimonM_89 wrote:
I'd also like to say that Internet Explorer is a complete banana split. I've only tested in the latest versions of IE, Chrome & FireFox so far, and IE has strawberry floated up half of the images, gallery & links

If it breaks in the
latest version of IE then that's your own damn fault for writing bad code.[/quote]
Chrome & FireFox seems to display it fine with no problems though. Looking back at the page of the dynamic drive site I got the gallery from, it does say that the effect doesn't work in IE. Explains why some of the links doesn't work as well as they're wrapped around the images. Looks like I may need to find another gallery to use then as a lot of people use IE as their default browser.