CMS and E-commerce

Basic Development Process

Now its time to take a look at development process. Basic development process consist of planning, design, programming, testing, publishing, maintaining and improving process.

The development process occurs in phases. If each phase is approached deliberately and the end results are properly generated, you’ll develop a great e-commerce site as effi ciently as possible. If, on the other hand, you jump around, rush the process, skip steps, and make omissions, the whole procedure will take much longer, and the end result will be buggier.

At the end of the development process, you’ll hopefully have created the best possible e-commerce site, but that site will undoubtedly need to be changed next week (as clients always want), next month, or next year. If the fi rst goal is a smooth, optimal process, then the second is output—specifi cally PHP code and a MySQL database—that is fl exible and scalable. When those inevitable changes need to be made, you should be able to do so without breaking or rewriting the entire system.

The first step in the development process is planning a generic site. This is much like establishing your business goals, but specifically with the site itself. What should the site do? What should it look like? Who are the target users? What browsers and/or devices should the site support? Use pen and paper, or any application in which you can make notes, and be as inclusive as you possibly can. It’ll be much better, further down the road, if you considered an idea and ruled it out than if you never thought of it in the first place.

The next thing you should do in the development process is mock up the HTML designs for the site. I, for one, have absolutely no design skills whatsoever. If you could say the same, there are two simple solutions:
? Hire a qualified designer to create the HTML templates.
? Use an off-the-shelf design that you tweak a bit.

If you don’t have the budget or time to purchase a custom design, you can take an existing one and modify it to your needs. There are both free and commercial designs available, although you’ll need to abide by the licensing where applicable. For example, some designs are free to use as long as you give credit to the designer in the footer. Other designs are free for noncommercial use but require licenses for commercial endeavors. In any case, you can take the existing template and then adjust the HTML and CSS to personalize the design for your or your client’s tastes.