Janine –

I bought Dreamweaver CS3 last fall and struggled learning it to develop a website for my new business. It’s hard to teach an old dog new tricks, but I’ve stuck with it. I have so much yet to learn as this is all new to me. I included prices, images, descriptions, etc., and figured it would all link to a shopping cart, as I was advised this was the program I should learn. I prepared an Excel spreadsheet with all the above information and customers would enter only quantity when ordering and the rest would be done for them. I found out I could not link this to a credit card system.

Because of time limitations, I hired a designer firm to do the shopping cart and integrate it into my Dreamweaver program. I asked that the codes be entered in my program as I wanted to control my site as I continued to improve my limited skills in Dreamweaver. Perhaps if you saw my site and the shopping cart which was designed for me, that will provide you with a better understanding of what I’m talking about. My site is www.techtrees.net and the start of my shopping cart is www.techtrees.net/shop.

First of all, I realized that the designers created a more professional site than mine, but given time, I will make improvements on mine. (How else will I ever learn?) The concerns I expressed to them were:

1.  It appears that I have 2 separate sites, as the trees are not listed on the side for the shopping cart — not that it has to, but in my view, the designer created a different format/style.

2.  I’m concerned about ease of navigation for customers from my site to the shopping cart.

3.  The designer did not build in formulas for different prices.

4.  I was told they would integrate in Dreamweaver and they did not. I asked the designer why they did not do this and was told it could corrupt my Dreamweaver.  (It appears that they used oscommerce shopping cart – php?)

Now the designer wants to re-create my entire site with a shopping cart and all for an additional fee and my husband says no!

Since I don’t know much about all the above, I searched the web to find out if Dreamweaver has a shopping cart. It appears there are templates. Then I stumbled on your forum where someone asked a similar question about integrating a shopping cart. My questions to you:

1.  Can a shopping cart be integrated into my existing website?  (I’d like the customer to click on a link to a tree where they would find the prices and where it says, Buy now, they would click to a shopping cart.)

2.  If #1 cannot be done, I don’t mind, I guess, going to another location for a shopping cart, but I don’t want to send the customer off to another site that looks quite different.

3.  Will php corrupt my site if integrated?

Janine, I know I’ve talked a lot here and I know you are an extremely busy person. If you can advise me in any way I would be most appreciative. I would like to continue to improve my skills with Dreamweaver and use the program for my small business website, but perhaps this is not the way to go. I don’t wish to continue investing more money and time into tutorials and such if I turn my website over to designers whom I have to rely on.

If the above is too much for you to answer/respond, would you please just email me and let me know that you do not have the time to answer my questions?

Thank you!
Margaret

Hi Margaret,

I try to answer all the questions I get by email. Here are a few responses:

1. I’m so sorry you hired designers that have disappointed you. Communicating what you want can be hard, especially when you are still learning. That’s just to reassure you that you are not the first to have such problems, so don’t feel so bad about it. (I’m sure it doesn’t feel good, but I can assure you from what you’re saying that it’s not all your fault in any way).

2. I can’t imagine how oscommerce could “corrupt” Dreamweaver, although it would probably be easy to break some of the code from the commerce system if you edit those pages in Dreamweaver. You’d have to be very careful not to alter the code for the shopping cart features, but in theory, you could edit the template pages in Dreamweaver.

3. Depending on how the template pages were created, changes could be tricky, so make sure you create a copy of your site so you can go back to the original pages if you need to.

4. Although Dreamweaver is capable of creating almost anything, your question is beyond the scope of what I teach in Dreamweaver. eCommerce is not a specific feature of Dreamweaver, and although you can create custom shopping cart systems, you have to have very advanced programming skills to do so.

5. For that reason, most people don’t create custom shopping carts in Dreamweaver (unless they are running very large sites). Instead, they create a custom site like yours and then link to a third-party shopping system.

I don’t know much about the system you say your designers used, but most work similarly. The best ones make it very easy to add products, prices, etc., but nearly all of them can be complex to customize when it comes to design.

Thus, you’ve run into a common challenge: it’s hard to make it all feel like one consistent site.

Some shopping carts are more customizable than others, and some systems are really easy to set up.

If you don’t want to invest more money with designers who have already disappointed you, you might want to consider trying a simpler system such as  Google Store or Yahoo Store. For a more advanced option that is designed to work with Dreamweaver, consider www.WebAssist.com.

I hope that helps and I wish you all the best,
Janine

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