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
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We finally have a budget and want to dump our intuit/homestead site www.originalartbroker.com Our budget is 5k-10k but could do more if needed. I am slowly catching my competition with this homestead site that I built. But I do realize it is time to step back, figure out what is best, and hire a pro to get the job done.
I am green in the seo and web development arena so please go easy on me and please help to point me in the right direction. Just went out on a limb a couple years ago playing with homestead.com site software and built what we have today. Didn't know anything about website development...it sort of just happened. I feel and know that homestead.com solution is hindering what we could be doing due to the bloated nature of the site and inability to perform such task as 301 redirects etc....
I have been able to slowly attain first page seo rankings on keywords based of the artists we carry using this po-dunk homestead platform to build my site after a ton of work education thanks to seomoz and a lot of you. But, have never asked for help and could really use some generosity of time in explaining a solution that would work best for our business.
Do we just go with a wordpress site that is similar to our current setup and use their plugins? Do we use a cms software solution like magneto or joomla? We will only have 200-300 pieces at any given time. We are constantly selling and buying new pieces providing us content. We are need of a site that can perform well in terms of seo. I have heard of a lot of people talking about joomla, wordpress, and magneto.
Would like to be able to have a product catalogue that ultimately sends whatever inventory we are uploading to our social sites and blogs so I don’t have to pump the product out to all of these sites. We offer free custom framing with our pieces and it would be nice to have a program that could wrap the photos of the pieces with the different frames for our customers. When I add a new piece I would like this software to have a predesigned product page that it plugs the information into. I would like it to create the url extension based of the artists name, medium used, and piece name to create unique and individual urls. I would like it to also create its own H tags throughout that product page according to the artist name description, and medium used. I would like to be able to sink this up to google merchant and other sites to carry our product.
Bottom line is we sell art. We sell pieces by specific artists. We are constantly buying and selling. I need something powerful that keeps up with our content
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i would go with Wordpress if I were you. Avoid joomla because it is clunky and in my experience (with an art supplies website believe it or not!) it gradually falls apart at the seams as you grow the site.
Wordpress is arguably the best of the lot because it is the most widely used and therefore has a broad set of add ons etc to suit just about any site.
I haven't used the others so can't comment on them.
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You need a CMS, and the generally accepted top 3 open-source CMS's today are: Wordpress, Drupal, Joomla.
You'll want to do your own research on these platforms to come up with what works best for you. They all have many things in common, and could all be used to successfully build the site you're imagining. But they also each have their quirks, their own communities with slightly different cultures, and different types of site-owners that prefer one to the others.
For whatever its worth, when I ask myself this question I come up with Wordpress for brochure-ware style sites, and Drupal for anything more complex.
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In my experience, Wordpress is the most user-friendly. This also allows you to easily optimize your site as they have great SEO plugins (we use the All-In-One SEO Pack). Wordpress is great for plugins of all kinds and is URL user-friendly as well (you are able to create unique URL's). The best part is pictures are very easily uploaded!
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The best software to use is whatever your developer is the one which your developer is proficient in using.
There are some fantastic custom sites which are pure HTML/CSS/PHP/JS. You mentioned Wordpress and Joomla. I am certain you can locate some great examples of sites using those software solutions. A Microsoft developer will point out how a .NET site will meet all your needs.
The questions are who will be designing your site? Once your site is designed, who will maintain it? Your site's success is completely dependent upon those answers. Will the work be outsourced? Who will perform the updates?
These questions are your starting points. Once those factors have been determined, the remaining answers will start to fall into place.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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
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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
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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
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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.
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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
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I don't know of good e-commerce solutions for Wordpress. If I was building your site I would recommend Drupal 6 with Ubercart.
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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?
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do you have any sites that you can suggest looking at that use this software?
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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".
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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.
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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!
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