Hi,

How many products and what are you planning on selling on your e-commerce website?

Regards

Adam Curtis

web design swansea - Clockwork Bear

For e-commerce cubecart have an open source version of their shopping cart. If your host uses cpanel you can do autoinstall with fantastico, then you only need to get a custom template that would lower your cost.

zencart
magento

are other open source alternatives.
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web design blackburn | web hosting blackburn | web design lancashire

Hi there - as other responses have already pointed out there are plenty of free options out there but I'm not sure it will reduce your one-off cost *massively*.

However, there are benefits to choosing an off-the-shelf solution other than one off cost; you are not tied into a bespoke solution that only the developer who originally did the work can work with. Any of the big open source solutions have thousands of developers contributing and enough know-how that you can shop around later on, when you want to have something changed or upgraded.

So my 2p worth of advice would be to at least make sure your developer agrees to use a standard solution and give you a detailed quote. With a standard solution the work is either in basic install and set up (10 minute job with something like Joomla) or in customization - changing layout, colours, functionality etc. The latter is where the bulk of cost should sit.

Some solutions to consider for the "back end to power it all" (or CMS; Content Management System) are Joomla, Drupal and of course Wordpress (which apparently can do a lot more than just manage a blog these days.)

btw; the only reason why you should care about the developer using HTML and CSS is to make sure they're not using Flash. Flash is nice but expensive to build and maintain. And as you no doubt have heard the iPad isn't too fond of it...

If you want to start using drupal / Joomla or wordpress for example and you haventy used them before or donty know how they function - then you are in for a steep learning curve. As for the cost , if you detail what they are doing in bullet points and also what your expectations are then people can judge whether it's value for money or not. PM me if you have a question, that you dont want to publish here.

And as someone just said - flash - I woud stay away from it. It isnt very SEO friendly - and if you read the IT press - there appears to be an ongoing battle between Apple and Adobe - the result being (I believe) that flash site dont work that well via iPhones.
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IT Solutions for small business

If you're looking for a social media integrated shopping cart, the zen carts, cubecarts, etc just won't cut it/

Have a look at these sites.

www.earplugshop.com
www.tinyprints.com
www.minted.com
www.tgkdesigns.com

They don't look anything like your out of the box shopping cart site,

They're acheived by using drupal backend. Unfortunately though you will need to pay a design firm to set up your drupal shopping cart because its not as user firiendly as wordpress or joomla to set up.

http://www.luispunchy.com/2008/04/web-design-project-minted/
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Industrial tablet PC

You should get the site built on a content management system, or adding new products/info will cost you each time.

£600 for a blog is a lot of money - we do entire websites with a CMS and blog for £350 upwards.

e-commerce is obvioulsy a lot more expensive due to getting the site to integrate with a PSP.
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