[Gavin Webb]

Hi. New to the forum and loving what I see.

I am in the 'very' early stages of business development and have been browsing the web for ideas for my website. Something I like is this order table set up (I don't know the true name ) Harlequin Design - Print - Display -- Quick Quote

Does anyone know how to go about creating one of these. I can do html and css but the linking to a cart bit is a little tricky.

I'm thinking of using Magento as the e-commerce software. Anyone tried this?

Thanks.

Gavin.

[KevJaques]

Well whatever you do dont use tables ;) use lists, much much quicker. Better still tho seo wise is to create an image and use some jquery for the grid, this way your content isn't all numbers. Of course that's my recommendation and only one way do it, there are lots more ways to skin a cat and pros and cons of those different ways.
Probably best to map it out on paper first to see what you need, then choose a suitable method.

Magento is template based so should be easy to use/change in bitesized chunks.

[Gavin Webb]

Thanks Kev. Do you have any examples as to what you mean? Are you suggesting something like Business Card Printing | Full Colour Business Cards > 350gsm, Gloss Laminated, Matt Laminated, Folded.

Gavin.

[IS-James]

Hi Gavin, welcome to the forum.

I have taken a look at the examples you have posted and have a good idea of what you are looking for. Implementing a grid similar to the first example using a system like Magento is quite difficult due to the way they manage products. But the second example would be fairly easy using configurable options, allowing a customer to select various options to 'build' a product and be given a price for that.

Magento is fairly easy to work with but I will warn you that it doesn't run well in a shared hosting environment. The memory requirements are quite high and most shared environments limit the amount of memory available to scripts which can cause all kinds of problems. It should run fine on a cheap VPS though.

If you are planning on offering a lot of products and want a fully fledged shopping cart then Magento is a good choice, but if you are only offering a couple of different products then it is probably overkill. A fairly simple PHP page that generates the necessary HTML for each of the product options and then passes the customers choice on to a payment gateway (either Paypal if you are staying simple or something like ProtX if you want more flexibility).

The way this works is by allowing the customer to choose their options and then generatign the code to set the right options for the payment gateway.

This is the way we create our special offer pages for Industry Square, it keeps it nice and simple without the overhead of a full shopping cart system. Take a look at our 'Switch your hosting' offer page for an example.

If you haven't used PHP before or aren't familiar with integrating into a payment gateway then it may be better to have someone else knock up the payment pages for you so you can just drop them into your site.

If you want more information on how this would work then feel free to get in touch with me on james@mulberrysquare.tv and we can work out exactly what you would need and how long it would likely take to put together.

[Boss Hog]

Originally Posted by IS-James

But the second example would be fairly easy

Didn't feel easy

EDIT:
Gavin posted a link to my site.

[KevJaques]

Yea something like that Gavin, you can achieve the same effect without tables too (although that's from a coding pov ;) )

The main thing behind it is you don't want your content to reflect numbers so they would not be within the content. Generation on demand as James pointed out is one good way to go.

[Gavin Webb]

Thanks everyone for your help and inspiration. I will probably go down the route of generation on demand. Thanks.