Finally have a budget for a great seo ecommerce site but need help choosing wordpress, joomla, modx, magneto or? Thank you in advance for your generosity of time

[seospain]

I am not personally a developer but being an SEO am able to work with most CMS platforms pretty well.

Wordpress for me has been the winner for long time. I have had clients who have used Joomla and it has been a complete nightmare for them. Doesn't help when developers disappear and leave you to try and find another designer at short notice and then find out nobody will touch it with a barge pole!!

Same goes for any kind of bespoke system. What happens when the developers are no longer around??

So word of warning. Make sure that whichever platform you go with, that is well supported and that  there are others on standby if the developers are no longer around to support you.

[StreamlineMetrics]

I am also a big fan of WordPress since it is very easy to use and basically 100% customizable, but in your case, I think you might be better off choosing an ecommerce platform such as Magento. While there are certainly ecommerce plugins for WordPress, I find Magento to be more robust and offer more features for managing inventory, orders, customers, sales reporting, etc. I would also suggest checking out Volusion and BigCommerce.

Also, I'd stay away from Joomla or MODx for an ecommerce site.

[forecastedinvestments]

Who will design my site will be determined once I figure out the best solution for my site.  I will at that time find someone that is efficient with that certain platform.  I am not going to work around a certain person and their limitations and would rather hear what experts on this site have to say and do my research from there.  I will hire whoever I can find that will be able tow ork with that platform at that time.

[forecastedinvestments]

Thank you for your post.  We are still not busy enough to need anything that would manage inventory, orders, customers etc.  We are old school and still use an excel and email campaign software to keep clients information.  Would you still suggest magneto?  I heard that it can be slow which is a major problem for our conent being higher resolution pictures etc

[forecastedinvestments]

Do you have any expamples of product sites that you have built with wordpress?  What ecommerce plugins work best for the ecommerce side?  I need to be able to add a product and it for it to create a page for that product while leaving the thumbnail of that product on the main artists page.  I would like for it to create a url extension based of the product information that is inputed.  I would like it to create automatic H tags for that specific product on its product page based off the information that is given on it.   Basically something that is seo storng and does some of the work for me

[forecastedinvestments]

Thank you Ryan.   Do you have any recommendations of plugins that would work well with what we are doing?  If you get a chance can you visit my site and give me a suggestion on what plugins to purseu with wordpress?  What is the best ecommerce plugin for wordpress? Something that is also seo powerful and will allow manipulation of the url extension or create it based off the product information given on the new piece being added to the site

[AlanBleiweiss]

If you truly have a budget for this work, the answer may be "none of the above".  I can't tell you how many times I've seen sites built in WordPress, Joomla or Drupal that required high quality user functionality, and in turn then needed the "out of the box" CMS to be customized extensively.  Then, six months or a year later, other changes had to be customized.  Because that's the evolution of the web.  (I've got sixteen years in the business).

If you have the right web developer who can create exactly what you need with an open-source solution yet one that is customized exactly the way you need it, you're not having to rely on developers having to find a plug-in that really doesn't do what you want, but that you're stuck with because the site was built in WordPress, Joomla or Drupal, and customizing costs a lot more than it would otherwise if it was a from-scratch site with that stuff already built in.

So the real process, then becomes :

1.  Write a comprehensive and detailed document that explains exactly what you need the site to do, under all the possible scenarios that apply to that unique site in that unique market.

Consider that your site might need to serve multiple markets (for example some visitors might be retail, and some might be wholesale).  Get that user experience information into the specification document.

2.  Provide that document to three different developers and find out what they would charge for the solution, and if they guarantee in writing that what the document specifies will in fact be included.

3. Make sure you really detail things out.  Don't just say "It has to work with SEO".  It should be a site that "accommodates current SEO best practices functionality".

Don't worry about the platform of choice.  Worry about getting a site that really meets your real needs.

[forecastedinvestments]

what addon for wordpress for the ecommerce side do you like the most?  I would want something that is seo strong and would allow the product to create its own individual page and url for viewing and combining with google merchant etc

[AdoptionHelp]

I don't know of good e-commerce solutions for Wordpress. If I was building your site I would recommend Drupal 6 with Ubercart.

[AdoptionHelp]

I agree with your process. Its almost impossible to have too much information up front, because its hidden assumptions that are often the cause of delays and projects going off schedule.

"Then, six months or a year later, other changes had to be customized."

But here I disagree. IMHO this is the best reason to go with a well-known CMS. When that point comes in the future where a change has to be made, would you rather have a custom built web site that only the original developer knows well (if they even remember) or a popular CMS with thousands of developers around the world?

[forecastedinvestments]

do you have any sites that you can suggest looking at that use this software?

[AdoptionHelp]

Here's a user-submitted list using the drupal/uc combo: http://www.ubercart.org/site

One last piece of advice: Avoid CRE-Loaded. I had to help a customer out of that system once and it was a complete nightmare of no documentation and hostile "support".

[AlanBleiweiss]

If it's an open source solution built on a common framework (PHP / Zend comes to mind as just one example) then the cost of the customization could very well be less than trying to adapt an existing plug-in to a new, custom function it wasn't intended to accommodate.

It may, yet it may not be less expensive to go with the off-the-shelf system.  I've seen plenty of sites that ended up costing more due to off-the-shelf system limitations and trusting on community created plug-ins to do what they were not intended to do.

Ultimately, I was just providing the alternate considerations that I've personally seen and had to deal with , both in SEO and before that, as a project manager responsible for some of the most powerful sites on earth.

[Guest]

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[artversion1]

For eCommerce you should go only with Magento. We build on all OS platforms you mentioned above however only Magento will be robust enough to support your needs for a long run. WP is really not there yet for high end eCommerce but is easier for developers to setup that's why you will find many redocomending it. Joomla and Drupal are great but not for eCommerce eider. You can nicely optimize Magento without much of a trouble and will give you great base to grow your business online. Good luck!

[KeriMorgret]

Are you going to have multiple shipping options? Do you want shipping automatically calculated? And do your paintings hit dimensional weight thresholds? I sell everything from six-foot-long fiberglass model boat hulls that are only a couple of pounds to thirty pound boxes of ball bearings that are easier and cheaper to send than the boat hulls. Shipping from an ecommerce site has been a nightmare for us, and it's something to consider when looking at your package choices.

[forecastedinvestments]

we really don't have logistics nightmares as we sell less items with bigger margin.  Shipping for us is not a concern and don't need it even calculated.  Most times we just include shipping and custom framing with out pieces.

Just wondering what people are using out there product sites and what they like.  Something that is seo friendly.  Easy to customize.  People rarely by high end art without communicating with us first so the functionality isn't that important when it comes to product management etc....

Seo is most important to me

[AlanBleiweiss]

artversion1,

With all due respect, in my experience, Magento is one of the worst possible solutions for eCommerce from an SEO perspective.  It's one of the most difficult CMSs ever created from that perspective. Yes, it can be used.  However the handful of times I've seen it in place, I've needed to spend much more time working with developers to "get it right" especially in taking it to a higher level of SEO, than Joomla, Drupal, WordPress...

[seospain]

Hi Ryan, Well I am not a developer so don't want to give you the wrong advice. I am sure there are many here on SEOMoz who can advise better than myself.

Good luck.

[bemcapaz]

I would like to recommend Prestashop. Its very stable, faster and really mature CMS for e-commerce created by French developers.

The downside is that the modules are normally really expensive (the cheaper will cost around € 30) and are generic**,** but you can easily hire freelancers to do that part of the job for you, i just didnt because im aprogrammer and was able to build my own modules.

Some points that I really like about Prestashop is: SEO Optmized, have a great cache (making pages loading speeds really fast) and is deeply integrated with ajax, making it really user friendly.

Currently im finishing a site that uses Prestashop, if you want to take a look its at http://www.ilet.com.br , not finished yet but can give you an Idea of how the CMS works.

And I wouldnt recommend Wordpress, yes, it is a great CMS and with the right plugins or templates you can have a fully operational e-commerce, however, it is not robust like Magento or Prestashop for e-commerce.

We have to keep in mind that Wordpress were built as a blog system, while others CMS like the two above were Build thinking about e-commerce. You will have much better resources (community, developers, cms) on the long run using a solution that is designed for what you want to do than trying to adapt something.