Out of the box or from scratch?

Gareth    Planning    

This is the first in what will no doubt be a series of posts on the design of webtogs.co.uk. We looked at lots of ‘out of the box’ type solutions, including open source offerings like oscommerce. In the end, we decided to develop our site from scratch. For us, with the development team we have on tap, this was a fairly easy decision to take. I think if you don’t have that benefit, it’s a scary thing to take on and do well, but perfectly possible.

As with all things, money comes in to it too. Even with our advantages, the cost of a total build from scratch would be far higher than integrating one of the many solutions already done. For us, the flexibility to do exactly what we want, outweighed the increased cost in money and time terms.

I take my hat off to the many open source developers who have put together oscommerce. It’s a great bit of kit, with some really useful librarys for a whole host of things ecommerce related. We were quite excited at the prospect of starting webtogs on a osc base, but after chatting to several ajax / php developers who had played with it in the past, some of the features we wanted for our site were going to be a nightmare to integrate with osc. If your looking to build a shop online and have some technical help / skill, I think osc is a great product, but like any ‘out of the box’ solution, it has it’s limits.

Shopify was another solution we looked at. It’s an interesting platform, with some nice templates, but we reckoned we’d hit a brick wall fairly quickly on lot’s of areas. In particular, search is a big issue for us. We’ve spent some time working on a Tags based structure to allow for ‘natural’ search, in so far as it’s possible, and shopify (along with some others) just wouldn’t have allowed this kind of approach.

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