Hi,

 

New here, so firstly hello!

 

I have an upcoming project which I am looking for advise on. I have a reasonable amount of web design experience, but by no means an expert, hence I would like to use a cms as it cuts out a lot of the ground work, I also really like the foundation 5 framework as again I find it helps cut down on the amount of coding / styling required. With this in mind my client requires the following from her new site;

• Company website which gives a company profile and allows various pages about the various products and brands
• CMS - A must have so they can perform simple tasks themselves
• Shop
• Customer profiles
• Custom price list for products per customer
• Ability to have macro sites for promotions

As you can see, that's quite a task, so the question is, which CMS / e-commerce package would be the best starting point for such a project? I'm not sure Wordpress is robust enough, Adobe Business Catalyst has high running costs and is very difficult to get training in.

Any suggestions?

Many thanks in advance

Hey Grantsmith,the best CMS I would personally suggest you is WordPress. My personal experience as a programmer for last 6 years makes me feel that just go with WP. Let me know if I could be any help to assure that you would use WP for this sort of site. Inbox me at dhananjaya18@gmail.com. Cheers Mate !

While Wordpress is capable of doing this kind of project you are probably pushing it's boundaries in terms of capabilities. I'd recommend you go with something like Magento.

 

Wordpress is great for brochure type sites and basic webshops but for things like customer profiling and so forth is a bit much. Magento is more suited to the spec you wrote, there are others too but i'm not so familiar with them.

Hi, thanks for the replies, I also forgot to mention we need to able do email marketing campaigns as well, not sure if this alters the choices available.

 

Also, which ever direction I go in, I have quite a large budget for training, I am finding Adobe Business Catalyst courses hard to find, well tutor led courses, there are plenty of online options, but I find them hard to stick with.

 

How is Magento for training resources? I also had PrestoShop suggested to me this morning as well. Any preferences? Again I will need a good training resource.

I couldn't tell you to be honest as I'm based mostly in the Front-end and haven't actually used Magento much, we have used it on projects and our back-end guys dealt with it, They said it's powerful but a bit overkill for smaller webshops. Yours sounds like it would need something like magento, however there are plenty of other good alternatives that I am sure others on here will have more info on.

 

Sorry I couldn't be of more help.

I would also recommend opencart -- if you're happy to consider this - it is open source ands come along way.

 

With a few "add ons/modules' it can do most of that - not too expensive either.

Thanks for the advice everyone, I must admit I am leaning towards Adobe Business Catalyst as I am confident it can handle everything I require and I also have previous experience using the system.

 

I just need to find a good tutor lead course to fill the gaps in my knowledge. But I will make a new post on this subject.

I'd advise looking at WordPress in conjunction with the WooCommerce plugin. This gives you the benefit of using the popular WordPress platform, whilst being able to sell products through your website. There are also plenty of pre-built themes available for WooCommerce which you can download and tweak.

Hi.,

It is better to go with Wordpress. You can use the a woocommerce enable wordpress theme to manage your ecommerce

Checkout this article -. Responsive WordPress Woocommerce Themes

Hope this will help you.

You'll most likely find more resources for WP and Woo Commerce, but I have to second Magento in this case.

 

Alternatively you could give Perch a go - notably Perch Runway. That's my current CMS of choice at the moment.