Hello everyone,
I have a new project that I am needing to get done professional and somewhat quickly. I currently have a CS Cart programmer that can put my design into a CS Cart skin.
At this current time I am needing a very professional design or design team to work with so that I can get a design for a company that is currently live right now. My budget is around $2,000/$3,000. It seems to be very hard to find an actual professional CS Cart designers these days. You don't necessarily have to have CS Cart template designing experience but it would be a plus since you have an idea of what exactly the design will need to include, blocks, etc.
My programmer said all he really needs is the PSD's for all the main template pages and the CSS/HTML files if possible.
Please PM me if you are interested and meet the specifications.
Thanks!
Be careful. Many “programmers” have no clue about the architecture of cs-cart and how to work within it. Instead, what they do is simply overwrite the main template files with old style graphic/html slices and believe they have done a design for cs-cart.
As a customer, you should:
- Require they use hooks to implement their changes. If what they are doing can't work with existing hooks, require that they add hooks to meet their needs and to document these changes in a changelog you can refer to at upgrade time.
- Require that they guarantee their work to be upgrade independent for at least the main release tree it was released on (2.0, 2.1, 2.2, etc.). Requiring them to support their changes between major revisions (2.0 to 2.1) is not realistic. But changes within that tree (2.1.2 through 2.1.4) should be expected.
- Get samples of other cs-cart work they've done or at least ask them to describe how they customized the site.
- Require that they support the customization in all the major browsers (current versions) and IE-6 (still the most widely used).
- Get references of other cs-cart merchants for your “programmer”
I know of only a few who do the customer side of things within the cs-cart architecture. It generally costs more and takes a bit longer to develop. But the long-term rewards are well worth the effort. But even with these, most will balk at item #2 above.
Good luck.
[quote name='tbirnseth' timestamp='1310249905' post='116738']
I know of only a few who do the customer side of things within the cs-cart architecture. It generally costs more and takes a bit longer to develop. But the long-term rewards are well worth the effort. But even with these, most will balk at item #2 above.
[/quote]
Hi, can you post who those few are.
Thanks.
D.
[quote name='tbirnseth' timestamp='1310249905' post='116738']
4) Require that they support the customization in all the major browsers (current versions) and IE-6 (still the most widely used)
[/quote]
I was about to write a post about this issue. Everybody predict that IE6 will die, but it keeps rolling.
Truly the best customers are the those middle size, 8+ years companies and usually their computers are old and the last upgrade was windows XP. Don't even upgraded, maybe they just got the computer with XP on it.
Some commercial cs-cart templates look screwed in IE6. Best advice will be just try to learn all you can about IE6-7 and look for advice. The other solution will be just implementing a browser detection on page load that prompts “this page is better viewed in IE8” message.
For front-end development, ones I know who cover most of my list are:
Brandon V. - here on the list
cscartrocks.com - Louis from here too
alt-team - Not exactly sure where they’re located, I think maybe Russia.
Others have come and gone but these seem to be the ones who stick.
I do not have any direct experience with alt-team but I’ve heard good things.
I know Brandon pretty well and he does good work and is very attentive to customer needs.
Cscartrocks is probably more technically experienced than Brandon in HTML/JS development and is also very attentive.
I find with most things that establishing a good working relationship is far more important than price. Someone who I can communicate with, pursues my needs and is responsive to my feedback saves me much more in the long run than an up-front price will ever cover.
I also look for others who contribute feedback to users here on the forum. You can learn a lot about how people work with people by observing how they respond to others in need here on the forum. Those that don’t help, start to loose points with me. It’s like any community, if you’re part of it, you have certain responsibilities to it.
Of course, if you have back-end needs, then I’m the best I know of! 
To add to this…
Designing a shop and implementing a design into CS-cart are 2 different things.
You could also have a real designer design the shop for you and ask one of the more technical guys to implement this design for you. Some companies have both working under one roof.
This usually gives you the highest quality of both… as most technical guys are not the best in graphic design, and vice versa (before I get angry responses: not always true of course! I'm sure some excel in both, but it's not my experience)
[quote name='Flow' timestamp='1310285185' post='116768']
This usually gives you the highest quality of both… as most technical guys are not the best in graphic design, and vice versa (before I get angry responses: not always true of course! I'm sure some excel in both, but it's not my experience)
[/quote]
Nice comments. I have the impression that between the tech guy and the graphic guy there is a chair for the web designer.
One guy could design a nice color page, and the other could make it read and write a database, but web design is more about navigation. Web design is more about taking the visitor into a tour: relaxing and inviting.
@Tony,
Wow, thanks for the vote of confidence, I really appreciate it. I try to do my best to make any of my clients happy and I always try to go “above and beyond” to get the job done correctly.
I agree with all of your points. I'm usually happy to help get someone upgraded between the sub versions. Usually it works out good. Most of my changes are done using hooks so the design usually transfers over fairly easily. I actually just upgraded a store that was pretty heavily modified from 2.1.4 to 2.2.1 yesterday. It actually went really smooth and I only had to change a few things. I bet the whole design upgrade took less than an hour to do. Not bad in my book.
@Flow,
First, I'm not ignoring your Skype. I've meant to reply, but just haven't had the time.
I also agree with what you said about the design/programmer/graphic designer thing. I can implement a design and do some graphic stuff, but coming up with a design is not my strong point. Usually my stuff comes out pretty simple and kind of standard. It's nice to get a design in a PSD format or similar and then just do the technical stuff and implement the design.
Thanks again for the compliment Tony.
Brandon
Hey Brandon,
No worries mate… I saw your message but it was too late, I had fixed the problem myself and after that I was on the road for some days.
I appreciate all the work you do here… and what you say about the design, that's exactly what I meant.
Thanks for all the tips and hints. I have already worked with a coder that is more then capable of doing the coding and implementation for me. Right now I am just trying to find a professional designer to get me the PSD's and what not.
I have noticed there are a lot of designers out there that say they are “professional” but my definition of professional might be different from theirs. This website is for a huge startup company and it must be professional, easy navigation, and catch your attention.
Lets just say right now we are using ShopperPress and Wordpress as our eCommerce solution. I had to recommend to switch it over to a completely customized CS Cart shop.
[quote name='jkclubwear' timestamp='1310319432' post='116794']
Thanks for all the tips and hints. I have already worked with a coder that is more then capable of doing the coding and implementation for me. Right now I am just trying to find a professional designer to get me the PSD's and what not.
I have noticed there are a lot of designers out there that say they are “professional” but my definition of professional might be different from theirs. This website is for a huge startup company and it must be professional, easy navigation, and catch your attention.
Lets just say right now we are using ShopperPress and Wordpress as our eCommerce solution. I had to recommend to switch it over to a completely customized CS Cart shop.
[/quote]
Hi, if you want something really professional I would suggest you make it a contest on 99designs.com. Tons of designers will work on your project based on your requirement. We used it for a project before and also a logo and was very surprised by the result. Then you might want to use the service of http://www.psd2html.com/ to convert your PSD to super fast CSS. Then you designer can use it to implement your site or you can use the guys at http://www.alt-team.com/ who has a lot of experience doing just that.
Best of luck in your project and let us know how it turns out.
D.
I think Tony made many good points, but Im not sure I agree with this one;
[quote name=‘tbirnseth’ timestamp=‘1310249905’ post=‘116738’]
4) Require that they support the customization in all the major browsers (current versions) and IE-6 (still the most widely used).
[/quote]
Definitely ensure that your site works across major browsers, thats a no brainer. But I would check your stats to see what percentage of users are visiting your site with various browser versions.
There are sites out there that give you figures on the worlds current usage of browsers, but that may be far from accurate to your situation. World-wide browser stats are likely to be influenced by third-world countries and all sorts of things - it doesn’t mean these users are coming to your site.
For example, my designer recently told me that only 5% of users are on Safari, I told him that in our case its higher since our customers surf our site on iPhone, iPad etc. We went and looked up the stats for my site and it turned out that a whopping 30% of our users are on Safari. My designer was floored.
1.7% of our users are on IE6 and when I say ‘user’ some of these are bots from TrendMicro etc scouring our site for viruses etc through an IE6 browser.
I reckon people still using IE6 would be used to seeing some whacky layouts since XHTML has been with us for a while now Give em another screwy layout and it might prompt their lazy asses to upgrade (if they can - and they’re not trapped some ancient corporate solution)
Just my 0.02c
-Scott.
You're right. I have almost no IE6 visitors anymore and more then 15% MAC users.