The first stage of creating an ecommerce website is of course coming up with a good idea. Whether you’re selling organic tomatoes or Toshiba televisions you have to have your ideas in place before you go on to the next stage. One area that must almost immediately be attended to is the site design. It has to be eye catching, organised and fit with the theme that the site is trying to create.
You don’t want for instance, a children’s toy site in a sinister black and red design. That’s just an obvious example but it makes the point that a sites design has to be tailored correctly. It can however be very time consuming to constantly tweak and redesign a site. Fortunately there are tools available which can make the process both quicker and easier without having to cut back on the sites aesthetic appeal.
Photoshop is often closely tied to websites in the design stage, but thanks to a variety of plug-ins it can also provide a highly useful development platform. Media Lab Inc are a top provider of Photoshop plug-ins and have recently announced the impending release of SiteGrinder 3. This development feature can quickly and efficiently build web stores with fully integrated shopping cart features including CSS and XHTML right from Photoshop using basic Photoshop text and art layers.
In addition once the site is up and running the SiteGrinder software can allow you to edit and manage content on the site from and internet ready computer.
Furthermore it’s not just for beginner web designers, as while it generates the code directly from the Photoshop setup this can be easily edited afterwards in Dreamweaver for instance. As such a non-developer can create a working site from scratch and without having to write a single line of code, while a seasoned developer can use it to create a foundation on which to build.
Of course like they say ‘there’s no such thing as a free lunch’ and the SiteGrinder 3 service will cost you. SiteGrinder 3 is set to become available from the 29th of March and clients are being encouraged to make the transition from SiteGrinder 2 and pre-order the product. By pre-ordering you can receive a discount with the full Web Suite available for $499 with a $300 saving.
Clearly this isn’t the cheapest tool available, but by offering high quality web design with multi level menu creation, dynamic function input and easy flash feature input among an abundance of other features it’s clearly going to sell.
Of course… you could always just use notepad.
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Tags: Ecommerce, web design
