Designer required

[los_design]

Yeh Happy Birthday Daren - Iii have a G+T on you.

Taste better in a glass wouldn't it Malc?

[los_design]

Happy Birthday Daren.

I trust you and Mal are recycling the empty bottles sitting on top of the AUG??

But of course...gotta keep our rubbish weight down to avoid the council surcharge

[RuralWeb]

I trust you and Mal are recycling the empty bottles

Ahh reminds me of the days when my party trick was eating glass bottles - which is what I feel like doing to my PC most days

[leehack]

Mal you are a freak!

[jont]

That explains plenty Malcom

[RuralWeb]

Notice that you cannot see my teeth on my picture

[fatoftheland]

Wrighty23,

Feel free to contact me regarding a design for you to drop your products into. I'd be more than happy to give you a quote for designing a store. Primarily I co-develop and manage a large online store (5-6 thousands products) so I can advise you aswell as design for you. I've built an entire custom CSS V8 site in around 8 hours so I could turn around a site for you in a matter of days.

Feel free to contact me on 07931 594781, and visit www.wholesaleheating.co.uk as a starting point to view an example of our flagship site.


- Andrew Smith

Thanks for the heads up Malcolm

[RuralWeb]

Andrew - I think you will find that your last post may be outside the forum guidelines

No explicitly commercial postings promoting products or services are allowed

otherwise all us expensive designers would be putting our best bids on the forum.

[Ho Ho Bird]

Thoughts from another beginner

Hi Mark - I found myself in a similar situation to you. I nearly spent £3500 last year to get someone to design and build a site for me, but when I saw V8 I thought it might be worth ago myself. I've certainly put many hours in and it may prove eventually to be a bad decision, but I've been left with one big conclusion....

Writing the spec for the site (to give to someone else) is also very difficult.

The beauty with V8 is that is is very easy to change the layout. I've tried (and virtually succeeded) in building by site without changing any code or introducing New Variables. The changes I've played about with have just been done by ticking different boxes and selecting from drop-down menus.

As an example: Do you know how big you want your photos to be? I've tried lots of different sizes to get the maximum amount of items on one page yet still be able to make sense of the photo. Doing it yourself, you can try size and size, each step taking 2 minutes and you get to see the result immediately....and you carry on until you are happy with it.

.......I've worked out exactly the best layouts for each type of item I sell (round school clocks, vs long thin Grandfather clocks).

......I've changed many times the way I've grouped products into different sections in the catalogue.

......I've decided I want the banner to be slightly darker grey.

No matter how good and experienced the developer, I couldn't have answered these questions upfront.

I would imagine it is difficult to acheive the same process when you work with a designer, who perhaps you see weekly and chat with once a day. I think I would have been a client from hell if I'd asked for all these changes. I know the 3.5K budget would have been growing rapidly.

The result:
I'm very happy with the look I've got, and it seems to work.
BUT am aware its taken well over 100 hours
AND I may have done somethings to achieve the look that may come back to bite me later
AND I've relied on the forum alot and feel awkward asking for free help from professional developers.

Probably in the end it depends on how you value your time (£/hr) and how 'warm and cosy' you feel with a potential developer.

I feel empowered going forward, knowing I can add totally new types of products to my business, or completley change the look of my site, as my needs change. However, us Antique dealers aren't doing much business at the moment so perhaps can afford to use our time this way!

Have a look at www.hohobird.com

[pinbrook]

The normal procedure if anyone is looking for a designer, SEO, hosting etc is to place the request in "Any other Business" and invite replies by PM or email.

Personally I feel there is no problem if someone is looking, to post a quick reply in the forum to give us a call if you want to chat ie we are available. The asker can then research the respondant and contact them if interested. Don't forget several of the designers who have contributed to this thread have also ruled them self out due to exsisting committments, so getting a heads up from someone who can take it on is very useful info.

There should be no hard sell in the community - ie we have seen long posts from spammers including links to sites they want to promote.

The key is do not directly contact anyone unless they have asked to be contacted.

Whilst I understand the desire by some to develop a site and self build due to cost implications (coupled with a desire to learn and self manage), this does cause the project to take n times longer to start to make money. I've also seen many a self built site look an absolute fright - therefore will never sell due to design faults, usability issues, credibility, SEO etc etc. A good site from a good developer will hit the web running and should be taking orders from day one. A self built site often takes weeks or months to get its first sale espec when the builder is starting from a zero level of knowledge.

I can site a recent example of this, I was asked to develop a site in the last quarter of last year, the company already had a non-ecommerce site and is a known branded product. We managed to get the site live for mid November, the sales on the site pre Christmas subsequently paid for the site development. The only person is the company who had the ability to put together a website did not have the desire or the time, we manged to capitalise on timing for them.

Just MHO

[wrighty23]

thanks everyone again for your valued input.

iam in a pretty good postion at work at the moment, business has slowed due to the time of the year and i do have quite a bit of time on my hands.

im good at design, probably would say exceptional, but it is the HTML and web design that i am going to have to learn quite quick. i can use photshop well and have justed started to tinker around in fireworks.

i have decided that i am gonna give it a good go myself and use the experience of the people on the forum to guide me in the right directions. the main thing that got me to this decision is the amount of feedback i got from my first ever post (this one). 24 replies in less than a day, thats very comforting knowing that people frequent this forum regular.

gonna start asking a few simple questions for the start of my site and then work at it one bit at a time.

iv found it quite easy to change image size, layout of the pics and so forth. read the getting strated manual a couple of times and things seem to have sunk in. its ammending the code where im getting a bit lost.

Q1. design site first and then add products? OR add products then design layout?

Q2. i have over 100 products in some sections, how do i make them appear 10 per page rather than a long list?

Q3. i want to add a variable to my extension window that pops up when product images are picked. i have done this by adding variable and placing it in the design code of that window. how can i get text to appear next to it in the window without me having to type it each time ie. variable box for height, text would read Height (mm): i dont want to keep writing this each time.......i want it to be simliar to the price vairiable box in product settings, where you only need to enter price and the PRICE: text appears along with the price (hope that mkaes sense )



regards,

mark

[jmedinger]

Wrighty

Please feel free to contact us regarding generating a site design for your project.

We can send you links to previous projects and designs and discuss any level of invovement that you require.

Best regards

Jos Medinger
Get Online Design

[fatoftheland]

Good call Wrighty to try and design your own site. If you can I would recommend looking at designing the overall look and feel of your site in Photoshop and then pull this to bits and put it back together in Dreamweaver. You'll then simply be able to drop Actinic content straight into the design using the built in Extension that links Actinic to DW...

This all probably sounds like gobbledegook but have a look at the Advanced User Guide and the Knowledge base for info on this.

Q1. Always design your site first then add your products. Actinic is great at product management and you can simply import your products via CSV once you have worked on how you want the store to look. Design the outer design (navigation and toolbars) then work on the body of the site: Section design (pages which lead to products - This requires wrapping actinic content in the design tab in custom HTML). Building a few versions of the different product templates you require (similar to designing sections).

Q2. You'll need to catorgorise your products using sections. E.G if you have 100 widgets but 10 are red 10 are blue 10 are orange etc etc then build a section for each type of widget.

Q3. Not too clear on what you mean here? The variable can probably be imported via Hierachal CSV...

Hope this helps

[wrighty23]

thanks fatoftheland

a response to question 2.

my majority of products are lighting products for the home. in the decorative ceiling fittings i will have like three hundred prodcuts, the only thin that sets them apart is the design. maybe it is best i make a page for each range instead of listing every ceiling fitting.

i gonna try and design the exterior of the site in photoshop and then put it into dreamweaver and then put it into Actinic. is this as easy as it seems? i seem to be working quite a few things out by trial and erro so i should be okay in a couple of weeks with all this (fingers crossed)

any more help would be appreciated,

regards,

Mark

[pinbrook]

Q2. i have over 100 products in some sections, how do i make them appear 10 per page rather than a long list?

create subsectons of 10 products each, then read the advanced user guide to tell you how to put [next][previous] links on each page