Setting up a minis web site

[montka]

Hi guys,

anyone know what is involved in setting up a decent web site?
Especially if one wants to have a shop element in it, eg buy painted minis at the shop?

I would like to have a site where I can decorate with original art and stories, with minis also available for sale, I think it will be fun.

But I am worried that to keep out the perfidious hackers one would need to be a coding expert?

What do you say?

 

[Arma]

I recommend looking into a decent CMS like Joomla or Drupal then, consider adding on a e-commerce package once you have the CMS up and running. I love Joomla and both my schools site run off it!

 

[Chern Ann]

I strongly recommend going with a hosted solution like BigCommerce or Shopify, if you have the budget for a couple of bucks a month. If your shop element is just for one off sales, then a hosted blog at blogger.com, wordpress.com would be free and secure, and you just list your painted items with a special tag and a paypal link.

To give you an illustration, I have received two security notices on our forum solution within the span of 3 weeks; the wordpress backend hosting some of our other sites needs to be updated about once a month. While the updates are not technically difficult, they may be required at any time which can be extremely annoying when all you want to do is post stories, pictures and sell stuff. Missing a single update can cause a significant amount of grief. Warseer, was hacked and down for a while 2 months ago, for example.

 

[RuneBrush]

As much as I love doing the bespoke solution, I'd agree with Chern on this. Having a hosted solution not only removes any update maintenance etc you would have to perform, but also will give a customer that bit of confidence that you're a real business.

I've heard good and bad on Joomla, some rave that it's brilliant as a CMS but I have heard of people having their sites hacked before. Wordpress is pretty straightforward and I've seen some stunning sites created with it.

What is your level of expertise by the way?

pete

 

[montka]

Thanks for your replies.

I've read a book on HTML and am learning C. All the solutions mentioned so far sound fantastic.

I basically want to be able to put all my hours into painting and very few into learning about new software etc.

What is the purpose of CMS? If its what it sounds like, I think ebay could use some CMS for bulk uploading and revisions to auctions. Man, I can't wait to see the back of that site!

ps what do you think of www.mightygenerals.com? I bought it last night!

 

[AllTerrainMonkey]

CMS's are Content Management Systems. They're a way to automate the majority of what it takes to get content in a website. For instance, you didn't need any HTML knowledge to post on these forums, or add pics to this site (beyond the most basic tags). Without a CMS, you have to hand-code every single page, link, etc. If your site is one or two pages it's not a big deal; if you have a couple hundred news posts and images, it gets insane.

 

[RuneBrush]

if you have a couple hundred news posts and images, it gets insane.

Or as I like to call it "interesting"

 

[AllTerrainMonkey]

I do web development for a living; I prefer the times when it's not "interesting". Interesting usually means I have to work harder.

 

[Sukigod]

I do web development for a living; I prefer the times when it's not "interesting". Interesting usually means I have to work harder.

Amen, brother!

I'd agree along the course of Wordpress. The nice thing over Joomla is the updates can be done automatically from the admin backend - no ftp and such.

Do your research and setup a testing environment on your local machine using WAMP/LAMP/MAMP (Googling them will tell you enough about which you will need) and download/install them to play around and test to see which works better for you - they're both very different beasts even though they look the same on the outside.

Good luck!