Products

Solutions

Resources

Partners

Community

Blog

About

QA

Ideas Test

New Community Website

Ordinarily, you'd be at the right spot, but we've recently launched a brand new community website... For the community, by the community.

Yay... Take Me to the Community!

Welcome to the DNN Community Forums, your preferred source of online community support for all things related to DNN.
In order to participate you must be a registered DNNizen

HomeHomeOur CommunityOur CommunityGeneral Discuss...General Discuss...Thinking about converting existing site to DNN...Thinking about converting existing site to DNN...
Previous
 
Next
New Post
10/16/2006 4:18 AM
 

Hello, I'm hosting a site for a relative that is about selling party products.  Right now the site is awfully hard to maintain being static while having over 100 pages of products.  Obviously there is a need to make it more dynamic, being able to easily add/remove/modify products and pages but mostly, a shopping cart must be in place because right now, there is no automated way for a visitor to place an order.

My question, is DNN well suited for a need like this?  If so, how big of an effort it is for someone experienced in DNN to convert the site over?  The site's address is http://www.perfectparty.gr.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Nick

 
New Post
10/16/2006 5:32 AM
 
you need an ecommerce solution to achieve this, I recommend to have a look at catalook (www.catalook.net,  standard edition should be sufficient) - IMO the UI is not very intuitive, but it has a lot of international experience.

Cheers from Germany,
Sebastian Leupold

dnnWerk - The DotNetNuke Experts   German Spoken DotNetNuke User Group

Speed up your DNN Websites with TurboDNN
 
New Post
10/16/2006 5:56 AM
 

Sebastian is correct - Catalook isn't the prettiest picture at the moment but it does allow for tremendous flexibility in designing an ecommerce site.

You have the images already so that's a great help. And if you can work with an xls sheet you can manage much of your site this way quite efficiently and in small steps.

EG - http://www.inkandtoneronline.com.au (NOT FINISHED but it's live) each product range has it's own xls sheet - and as it's been corrected, has been uploaded invidually.  I have been working with this client for quite a while now but he's basically done all the content and sourced the images himself, and that site took us about 2 hours to get running, after all the content / xls sheets and images were provided. But don't think it's that easy OK - because the primary site - http://www.stationersonline.com.au took us a few months to get right - mainly because there were problems with the format of the XLS sheet -eg.. UTF7 & UTF8 stopping it from being imported.

http://www.style.net.au - that's about to have a face lift again- but that's running from an MDB file which has been imported- this took a while to get right - but the client has modified his access driven system and it now works really well.

http://www.chalkartstudio.com - that's managed by the sign writer - and we still have some issues with the xls formatting, but the whole site overall has been self managed, once we got the structure in place, and there are plenty of other sites around - this is one I came across today - http://www.beachbeautiful.com/

So while we don't have thousands of sites using ecommerce yet, I think this gives some little examples on how it can be transformed.

There is also the manual online at http://www.catalooksupport.com which gives a bit more information on how the store can be managed.

I have some other very nice sites coming up with Catalook but like anything they take time to develop and they aren't available just yet.

What is quite unique about DotNetNuke and the ecommerce that can be attached, is that not other solutions offer such a "plug and play" method of growing your website. Either it's ecommerce or it's not, so it's been well accepted, and another thing is the skinning aspect of it. I think DNN provides the most flexibility to create a unique look and feel and to integrate it with ecommerce, well, that's just another great reason to use it.

Hope this helps you with your decision making process.

Nina Meiers

 


Nina Meiers My Little Website
If it's on DNN, I fix, build, deploy, support,skin, host, design, consult, implement, integrate and done since 2003.
Who am I? Just a city chic, having a crack at organic berry farming.. and creating awesome websites.
 
New Post
10/16/2006 6:50 AM
 

Sebastian and Nina thank you both!  Catalook seems very interesting and I noticed the price is good ($59 and $99).

If you can clarify a couple of things, does Catalook sit on top of DNN (I have to install and configure DNN first) or is it a all-in-one installation with DNN?

Also, you kept mentioning importing from xls.  What if the user wants to update or enter new products/pages manually?  Is that not possible?

Thanks again,

Nick

 
New Post
10/16/2006 8:04 AM
 
Catalook is great, but it does require some skills. May be you can think over some simple solutions
 
Previous
 
Next
HomeHomeOur CommunityOur CommunityGeneral Discuss...General Discuss...Thinking about converting existing site to DNN...Thinking about converting existing site to DNN...


These Forums are dedicated to discussion of DNN Platform and Evoq Solutions.

For the benefit of the community and to protect the integrity of the ecosystem, please observe the following posting guidelines:

  1. No Advertising. This includes promotion of commercial and non-commercial products or services which are not directly related to DNN.
  2. No vendor trolling / poaching. If someone posts about a vendor issue, allow the vendor or other customers to respond. Any post that looks like trolling / poaching will be removed.
  3. Discussion or promotion of DNN Platform product releases under a different brand name are strictly prohibited.
  4. No Flaming or Trolling.
  5. No Profanity, Racism, or Prejudice.
  6. Site Moderators have the final word on approving / removing a thread or post or comment.
  7. English language posting only, please.
What is Liquid Content?
Find Out
What is Liquid Content?
Find Out
What is Liquid Content?
Find Out