Help with Development Strategy

[NetlineSports]

Background: My wife has four MM sites (three running v4.24, one MM5) and she is ready to start building a 5th. She is very concerned about the look and feel of her sites and currently uses MM as the shopping cart but uses static pages to do all product display. I am lobbying to make the jump to dynamic pages to make adding products easier, track inventory, indicate In Stock/Out of Stock, etc. She?s designed all of the sites?just FrontPage (I know) and modules. It?s obvious we?re not programmers, but are not afraid of code and we?re anxious to explore. Look and feel is extremely important her and she?d like to keep her existing look and feel, or at least have that option. We?re anticipating buying Viking Coder?s Inventory Manager & Easy Update and one of their page template bundles, one of the two category tree modules.

Is it possible to use the various template modules to create a totally dynamic site that is close to our existing sites in look and feel?

What is the best way to re-create the left-side (category) menus? (category tree module?)

What is the best way to re-create the main product display screens? (category pages module, using tables?)

Any advice on modules, basic strategy and approach, and language skill sets we'd need (e.g. CSS) would be fantastic.

Would you recommend we use a developer/programmer/consultant to help us make the conversion? Anyone in particular that you can recommend?

Thanks,

Doug

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www.womenstennisworld.com (http://www.womenstennisworld.com)
www.kidssoccerworld.com (http://www.kidssoccerworld.com)
www.sportspartyworld.com (http://www.sportspartyworld.com)

[Vic - WolfPaw Computers]

You are right on the money.

Intergrating your static pages into Merchant is the best way to go. It will reduce having to double your efforts everytime you add/remove/edit a product. That is after all, what Merchant was designed to do.

And yes. With the template modules and maybe a handfull of other modules you can indeed keep the look and feel of the existing static pages.

For the MM4.x stores, I would recommend Viking Coders Designer's Dream Template bundle (http://tinyurl.com/kq852), Sebenza's New Category Tree (http://tinyurl.com/y82x72), as you mentioned, Viking Coders Inventory Manager (http://tinyurl.com/y2vcz8) with the Inventory Manager Easy Update (http://tinyurl.com/y6k4g5) add on.

For MM5, its a little more complicated. Sebenza's Template Suite v5 (http://tinyurl.com/yylx9k), Viking's Inventory Manager (http://tinyurl.com/kcqxr), however there are some bugs in Merchant 5's inventory "adjust stock" import. I am not sure if the Viking Module corrects this or not.

With basic HTML, the template modules, and some creative CSS, you could duplicate this.

Background: My wife has four MM sites (three running v4.24, one MM5) and she is ready to start building a 5th. She is very concerned about the look and feel of her sites and currently uses MM as the shopping cart but uses static pages to do all product display. I am lobbying to make the jump to dynamic pages to make adding products easier, track inventory, indicate In Stock/Out of Stock, etc. She?s designed all of the sites?just FrontPage (I know) and modules. It?s obvious we?re not programmers, but are not afraid of code and we?re anxious to explore. Look and feel is extremely important her and she?d like to keep her existing look and feel, or at least have that option. We?re anticipating buying Viking Coder?s Inventory Manager & Easy Update and one of their page template bundles, one of the two category tree modules.

Is it possible to use the various template modules to create a totally dynamic site that is close to our existing sites in look and feel?

What is the best way to re-create the left-side (category) menus? (category tree module?)

What is the best way to re-create the main product display screens? (category pages module, using tables?)

Any advice on modules, basic strategy and approach, and language skill sets we'd need (e.g. CSS) would be fantastic.

Would you recommend we use a developer/programmer/consultant to help us make the conversion? Anyone in particular that you can recommend?

Thanks,

Doug

www.ladiesgolfworld.com (http://www.ladiesgolfworld.com)
www.womenstennisworld.com (http://www.womenstennisworld.com)
www.kidssoccerworld.com (http://www.kidssoccerworld.com)
www.sportspartyworld.com (http://www.sportspartyworld.com)