Shopping carts and CMS - off the shelf or build my own?

[metamoota]

Hi,

I wondered what other web designers do.......

I have been getting asked more and more to build sites with e-commerce, and/or CMS systems, and as far as I can see I have a few options....


1) Try and integrate an off the shelf product?
Sometimes tricky and doesnt guarentee turning out exactly how the lcient wants

2) Build the whole system from scratch each time?
Would mean high costs for the client

3) Start building my own custom cart and CMS systems, which can be easily tailored to the individual client?
Big initial cost for me

4) Outsource to someone who specialises in these areas?
Wont make so much on a job (i.e. just the design side)


What do other people do/suggest?

Thanks

[Turtleman49]

Spend the time to make it yourself and patten it, sell it as a add on, or have the copyrighted source for yourself to add to your customers sites!. that way your customers have something very unquine, not something that 1000's of other sites have and that way you can edit the skin to it to suit the rest of the site (customized)

[Andrew K]

Unless your highly skilled just customise one that you can get online.. Gawd save your self hours of sitting there staring at code because your cart is crashing, rather spend that time making allready solid working code look good.

In the future create your own and on sell it or whatever.

[mythix]

Yeah I agree with Andrew, go with existing products that are known to work effectivly and have a large following, so if anything goes wrong it'll be resolved quickly. take a look at all the CMSs out there and look at the components avliable for them etc.. and the temnplating systems, then you cud offer a 'set' system for your clients, e.g. I can provide this... I cant build specifically for you

[johnn]

You can build a software package just for the fun of it, or if you need it for the many years and want to have total control, make money selling it, then build yourself. But beware: a great cms, shopping cart, or forum software take YEARS to create and maintain and may consume your time and your partner(S), or you create a simple one in about two months.

[artraid]

My suggestions is that you make a full featured, state of the art CMS. Make it highly modular, so that you can easily make it fit with any client's dynamic needs. Make it a shopping cart, News update, comment boards, guestbook, shoutbox, page add/remove, edit, etc., and of course a shopping cart. Then put it as your patented CMS solution. You'll see the $'s flow in no time... i hope

[boxhead]

Creating a CMS doesnt have to be complicating to be effective. In my experience, clients are usually amazed by the simplest functions, which save them hour and take you minutes!

CMS is all about putting yourself in your clients shoes and going through every possible process and out-come which may be required. Once you have a system, changing it for other clients is easy - just change the css and the graphics and add the extras and remove the un-needed.

monkey