WordPress E-commerce Website Design

Designing Websites For Selling Online With WordPress

The WordPress E-commerce Client

This website design and development was done for a customer in Apache Junction, who also has a location in Seattle, Washington. The customer makes storage beds, hidden beds, wall beds and DIY kits for beds. He previously had an online store, but it was designed in Joomla, not user friendly, and riddled with bugs. The Shipping did not work, it crashed on customers regularly, it was a mess, an expensive mess.

Redesigning And New Programming In WP

When Lift and Stor hired me to revamp their web store, I knew we needed to really make a change. I migrated the site to WordPress, rebuilt the shopping cart, set up shipping correctly using 2 different dynamic shipping calculators utilizing the Fedex API and the UPS API. I did the commerce with WP e-commerce. WP E-commerce used to completely suck in 2010, but now I love it.

Why WP E-commerce Is Better Than ZenCart, Magento or VirtueMart For Joomla

WPEC (WordPress E-commerce) VS Zen Cart

I Learned E-commerce on the zen cart, and so I was always loathe to move to a new technology. Unfortunately, time goes on, and we need to avail ourselves of new technology. The Zen cart back end is made up of dozens of items dropping down to 100’s of options. The products database, while sortable by category, uses an insane icon system, where you need to refer to a legend to figure what each icon does, or hover over the icons. WPEC, by contrast, uses a dropdown menu for the available options, very neat. On the front end, WPEC is far more easier to style, and its integration with the wordpress website design innovation of custom posts makes it a hands down winner.

WP E-commerce VS Magento

I know you have been hearing the same buzzwords I have. “Magento Is More Extensible” and “Magento is more robust”. I am here to let you in on a secret in the web design and development community. While extensible and robust are nice words, they are also double speak for complicated. While there are many situations where I am sure that Magento can outshine WordPress, the problem lies with needing a full time web designer to make your changes. It is far too complex to easily train staff on, and the extra functionalities that the word “robust” implies do not usually exist yet, so it is extensible in so far as you can custom program modules for it. This makes it good as a starting platform for gigantic online retailers, but far too cost prohibitive and a little too “robust” for even the most skilled clients I have worked with. As a Mesa Web Designer, I cannot in good conscience recommend a cart with such an overly complex design.

WordPress Online Store VS Joomla online store (VirtueMart or others)

When I was looking for a CMS to specialize in, I tried Joomla before WP. I found it clunky, slow, buggy, etc… I worked with three clients, all of whom were mystified and baffled by the backend. In the time I have spent becoming an Arizona WordPress Expert, I have certainly found that client after client prefers the WP interface, and loves the ease of their content management system. I am not saying that Joomla could not one day be better than WordPress, anything is possible, but right not WordPress is used almost 9X Joomla, and as a result is much more widely supported and extended. Anything that Joomla may currently do better, and there is not much, I guarantee WordPress will be doing it even better within the year, they are developing so quickly, so intelligently. It is rare to see software reach such a mature stage in its life cycle and still make solid improvements on a monthly basis, but they do it!!