I have never used a CMS before nor have I built a E-commerce site before so I have several questions regarding this and choosing one:
My background:
I am not a programmer: I am a designer and I am proficient with using HTML and CSS, as well as having some experience using and “tweeking” some Jquery Plugins such as sliders, picture viewers, to use in my markup.
I need help choosing the right CMS to build a E-commerce site for a very small shop and my choice of CMS must meet these requirements:
1) most important: the site must do some sort of automatic SEO for the products added using the names of the products, ie “poster of michael jackson”.
2) most important #2: The website doesn’t have to keep stats on a million things or have a million random features but the products we will be selling on this site MUST have a second level of variables to go with their choice. ie when the the buyer chooses to purchase the “michael jackson poster” – then they must be able to choose the “poster frame style” and see the choices in thumbnails for example of what these frames look like (wood, plastic, metal) and also other options such as “poster glass choice” with several types of glass to choose as variables
3) It has a very easy to use backend for my client (who knows nothing about websites) to update content.
4) Something I can set up without being a programmer given my skill set listed above. I can purchase or use a free template to get started but i’d like to eventually be able to stylize the site myself to give it my own theme/look and front end UI features such as a picture slide show or something I want to build/plugin that may not be part of the template.
Thanks in advance! I’m very very new to this stuff.
p.s. i was looking at magento, is that a good one for these requirements?
one option is an all-in-one hosted system like shopify, volusion, corecommerce, or yahoo stores. you can totally customize the design, but they handle the e-commerce engine and have seo compatibility… magento is excellent and is very customizable.