hello everyone. i have a pretty big project on my hands right now, and i really need some help to figure this whole thing out. i'm being a little indecisive as to which direction i want to go with it, so i thought that maybe a little input would get me moving in the right direction. so here is a break-down of what i'm talking about: we need to completely revamp our site design and structure (www.expresscomputersystems.com). we have several options that we can pursue right now, and that is where the indecision begins. i have our project listed on elance and craig's list; i've been getting about 30 emails a day. it's becoming harder to sift through the "noise" to separate the good providers from the bad ones. basically, what we need is to redesign our site with a new look and feel. we also need to create a database(MYSQL) that we can input our products into, and use to create dynamic pages(PHP). ideally, we would like to create a form on the front-end that has a few input fields (part#, description, etc...), that auto-populates our database. then, we want to be able to create pages from that data as easily as possible. the reason why i say, as easy as possible, is because we have a huge inventory of 5000+ products, and the time it would take to create each individual page would be outrageous if we didn't have some sort of automated process in place. i think the database design is the hardest part of the whole project. we also need sitewide search, but once we have the database in place, the search function won't be too hard to implement. now, i'm the internet marketing manager, and i don't have that much experience with MYSQL or PHP. i'm in the process of learning it all because i'm the only "web guy" that we have, so i'm wearing all the hats. i'm pretty sure that i can't figure something like that out myself, but there must be an open source product out there, that makes this whole process really easy to implement right? in a nutshell, i'm trying to figure out if i really need to outsource this whole project. someone mentioned using OSCommerce, but i've heard that it is hard to customize. has anyone had any luck with this?
You could do that with oscommerce, most of it you could set up yourself, then maybe outsource the more complicated parts of the project.
I've redisigned lots of oscommerce sites. It's a bit hard but i can be done. You can even search for some nice templates or buy one frum templatemonster.com Your site has an old looking design. You definetly need a redesign.
redesigning oscommerce sites can be very easy, just install one of the BTS or STS mods and it make the job a whole lot easier