Am I In Over My Head?

[Guest marklyon]

Hi all!

Just wondering - I'm a designer with plenty of experience of XHTML and CSS and very little of PHP & MySQL. I'm self employed and this CubeCart thing has really worked out for me on my first trial. I'll admit I've had some minor problems but I think thats just part of the learning curve!

So - I just wanted some opinions - as a designer do people think I might be getting a little in over my head if I advertise E-Commerce sites or is it worthwhile? Would anyone share their thoughts, opinions and experiences?

Many Thanks!

[Guest degsey69]

Anything is worth while if you enjoy it.

By working as an ecommerce designer you will develop other skills to help you and your client.

More especialy there is a lot of people here in the forums who will help you as well.

Go for it dude.

Degsey

[jerseyjoe]

Hi all!

Just wondering - I'm a designer with plenty of experience of XHTML and CSS and very little of PHP & MySQL. I'm self employed and this CubeCart thing has really worked out for me on my first trial. I'll admit I've had some minor problems but I think thats just part of the learning curve!

So - I just wanted some opinions - as a designer do people think I might be getting a little in over my head if I advertise E-Commerce sites or is it worthwhile? Would anyone share their thoughts, opinions and experiences?

Many Thanks!

Take look at my photo to the left. I'm overweight, have sleep problems, a bad shoulder being treated due to a fall, cry at chick-flicks, am campaigning for a presidential candidate who has an uphill struggle, never took a course in any computer code, am addicted to dark chocolate and wish that Frank Sinatra were still alive.

In other words, I'm pathetic.

But I make decent money building and hosting web sites for clients in 7 countries - and CC stores are the most profitable client category. I've found that developing a few skills in Photoshop and taking the time to understand site usability concepts, are important.

If I can do it, you can too, if you put in the effort. To add to what Degsey says, the support community here is one of the most generous I've found anywhere.

Stick around and you'll find out.

[Guest Brivtech]

If you are providing sites for customers, you don't necessarily need to be an expert, however, my advice would be to keep things simple and organised to save the headaches later:

- Keep all customer sites the same in terms of modifications and software versions.

- Have your own test site, for you to work on when you are making updates.

- If you have a template that's being re-used with different styling applied.

That way, when you need to apply an update or changes, you would have had the opportunity to fix anything that has gone wrong first before you apply it to your customer's sites. It will also make it much easier to make those changes as your customer-base increases.

As your customers start asking for more complicated things, learning some basic php code will help you out tremendously. Everyone has to start somewhere, 2 years ago, I couldn't program any php, now I write all my own mods. Build your skill-set as its needed. CubeCart is wonderfully written software to learn from.

Don't worry too much with the mySQL - Just learn UPDATE, SELECT, DELETE, WHERE, ORDER BY, and you pretty much have the basics.

Finally, don't expect everything to always work right. You will always encounter some problem or another. It's to be expected, and hopefully, they'll always be minor problems that you'll be able to resolve quickly (by testing before applying to customers sites). You'll have this problem with other programs, not jsut CubeCart.