How involved is taking a HTML site and adding CMS, social media, SEO, shopping cart for US and Intl sales?
ALSO being able to read site in different languages... is that software?
Expert Answers
Sort by Date
Sort by Votes
May 8, 2014
To take an existing site and migrate it on to CMS only may not be too challenging for a developer, especially if the HTML only site is complete. It requires taking the HTML files and converting them into a theme/template for the CMS so that the existing data is rendered by data from a database instead of from static files.
Once the theme is built and running on the CMS, depending on its flexibility, adding functionality for SEO and Shopping Cart can be a matter of just installing plugins and configuring them. However, in some cases, full web development needs to be done to integrate the shopping cart functionality, and integrate with a 3rd party service to handle the checkout process.
Total duration for this project may be about 2 - 3 months depending on the CMS, Developer and complexity of the existing site and the intended final product.
Else, simply build the site all over again from the ground up and outsource as suggested by others. All the best.
May 8, 2014
Hello Todd,
It completely depends on scope of your project and how much effort it will take to transform you HTML site.
If you are looking for brand new design then it will take 1-2 months and costs you around $5000 to $10000 depending on your requirement. If your current site is doing good with SEO and if you don't want to kill it and just need shopping cart features then you can add it.
And we are one of the development company based in India. Please PM me if you are looking for good website design.
Regards,
Praveen Reddy.
May 7, 2014
Depends on scope and any custom programming needed for desired interface components. We have worked on projects ranging from $500 - $900 to those costing over $5000 for similar needs.
Regarding translation you have two ways to go. Generic machine auto-translation or human translation. We are working with a resort client in Costa Rica that needs their site translated in the way Costa Ricans speak Spanish -- not the generic english to Spanish that Google translate and other services provide. This means someone must translate, then you must enter and format the translated content in the same way you did for the original content.
May 7, 2014
Hello Todd,
All of the above is true, but am I the only one asking what website you want to optimize? Send me the URL since it's always best to know the starting point of any Digital Strategy. Beyond that sky is the limit and time/money the incumbent.
May 7, 2014
O Boy so many different solutions, if you are not confused yet, let me put some sense to this. I will keep it short. If your website is not already too involved, the design can be transferred to any CMS system, and there are thousands of them.
if you have design files (PSD) we can re-use them.The content is easily transferred as well. Rest is just configuring your CMS .
Only reason you want to transfer is if you want to keep the same design. Otherwise starting from scratch will be so much easier and cheaper. Feel free to contact us and i will be happy to point you in the right direction.
also keep in mind what the goal of the website is? will it bring traffic etc...
May 7, 2014
Todd, I guess it is safe to say you are not a developer. If you wanted to do this yourself though, I would echo Elaine's statements. A standard "out-of-the-box" Wordpress installation with SEO and shopping cart plugins will do the trick, providing that you do not require any customization besides the theme (display).
On the other hand, should you, for example, want fine control over stock levels, product combinations, gift packs, taxonomies, various currencies, specials pricing, etc., it might be better to investigate specialist shopping cart software such as Prestashop or Magento. I am busy with a Prestashop project right now, and I must say, I have not found anything I wanted to do that Prestashop couldn't do yet. Prestashop also has multi-language, SEO plugins and the likes available. I can only assume that the same would be true for Magento and other leading eCommerce applications.
With that being said, many of the answers do not really answer your question: HOW INVOLVED is it. Well, I will attempt to.
If you are going the Wordpress route, the effort is far less, and it is far simpler, but in order to customize the site from the out of the box experience, you;d need the help of a developer. Using a specialist system is much more complex, especially if you want to manage products with fine-grained control. Not everyone need this level of complexity, hence, you need to evaluate what your needs are, and then make your decision accordingly.
To start off, I'd make the following decisions:
* What do I want to achieve?
* What is my timeline?
* What is my budget?
* What resources and expertise do I have available?
* What growth in my products/sales do I expect in the next 3-5 years? Volume wise? Range wise?
Answering these questions should assist you in making a choice of an out-of-the-box solution such as Wordpress, or a more specialist route.
As a web developer myself, the following difficulty scale is from my experience more or less correct, but that could vary from developer to developer or person to person - so see this as a guideline only. If you then choose a particular route, out of a scale of 10, with 1 being very easy, and 10 being very difficult, I'd have the following "INVOLVEMENT SCALE" for you:
2: Out-of-the-box Wordpress, with standard theme, and standard plugins.
4: Out-of-the-box Wordpress, with custom theme, and standard plugins.
7: Wordpress, with custom theme, and custom plugins.
9: Specialist software with custom "everything"
This should get you to a starting point to make your decision, hopefully.
Hope this helps!
May 7, 2014
It depends on if you want to do it yourself or have a third party assist. Then it comes down to a budget question.
May 7, 2014
You wouldn't try to salvage parts from a go-cart to make a race car; you'd start with a race car framework and build from there, right?
Pretty much, you're talking about a do-over, starting with a CMS framework on which you can hang all the other pieces you're looking for.
May 7, 2014
To do it cheap and nasty will take 48 hours, $500 and $10 / month.
To do it right will take 6-8 weeks, $30k and $1,500 / month.
The choice is yours! Call me if you want to do it right.
May 7, 2014
Think of it like moving to a new house, one that hasn't been built yet. What you have is the furniture (content) but you still need walls, floors, and windows. And anything that wasn't in your original website (internationalization, for example) is also needed. You'll be saving the expense of creating new content, but that's it. So the estimating the cost, time, and "how involved" the whole process will be requires details (such as how many of various things) and a plan, the same way building a house does. You can hire firms to architect your website plan the same way you hire an architect to create a plan for a house -- they'll ask questions like those already asked about how many products, but also how many hours you (or an employee) have available to deal with issues like credit cards not going through, and will recommend both content management systems and a variety of purchased services/products or outsourcing that is the best fit for you and your company. Depending on the company you hire to do this you may also hire them to create the graphics and build the site, or you may hire a separate company to do that the same way folks take their house plans to a builder.
May 7, 2014
With more than 50% of Internet access now coming from mobile devices, Responsive Design (HTML5) for mobile optimization is super critical. I don't see that being mentioned. For a project with the International scale like you are suggesting, get professional help.
May 7, 2014
Todd, I'm presuming you're talking about the http://www.celloxess.com/ site, and the three products you mentioned in your other question.
It seems to me that you need not only a website, but an online promotions strategy and a team capable of directing and/or executing on it.
I'm very interested in discussing this with you , but not in a public forum.
Check out http://www.millersbakeshop.com/ for an example of our most recent work in eCommerce. Multi-language sites are also part of our capabilities, example: http://cae.aboutcandidates.com/. (Some translations are currently under revision but the site as a whole functions well).
I've followed you here on mosaicHUB so you should now be able to contact me directly via my profile.
May 7, 2014
Depending on how many products you're going to have for sale on your website, I would recommend starting from scratch with a Drupal website - it's CMS system is very user friendly, great for SEO optimization and can easily handle eCommerce and easy for your client to update (with limited or full edit access) if they want to do it themselves. Drupal can be used with or without Responsive Design. We will be happy to provide a quote for this project.
May 7, 2014
This question could be compared to how involved is it to ride a horse. Well, if you are just jumping on and riding in a circle, not hard, not very involved. If you are planning on doing some sort of show with jumps...I recommend years of training first.
First and foremost, you will want to consider the CMS you might want to use. There are several and each has their own pros and cons. Our company uses WordPress for all of our client's sites because it is the simplest and most expandable as an online shop grows (hush all you WordPress naysayers).
A typical setup might look like this...
-Buy Domain
-Buy Hosting (if your store is small (under 500 products/1000 orders/mo) opt for a basic and trustworthy hosting company. We partner with Siteground for our hosting and they are great. If you have more products and orders, you might want to consider cloud hosting. Again, Siteground offers this. Another good option is Media Temple (recently purchased by Godaddy).
-Install WordPress (most of these hosting companies offer a 1-touch install script)
-Choose a theme from themeforest OR have a company like ours build a custom theme for you
-Download WooCommerce (a leading FREE ecommerce solution)
-Install your theme
-Install WooCommerce
-Browse through the WooCommerce extensions for something that your online business model might benefit from. Some of these include newsletter integration, social marketing, easy product management, custom product attributes, etc.
-Install any of these extensions
-Add your products, set up tax, set up shipping, set up any product attributes
- Add content to other pages of your site
-edit email notifications, etc.
So - this is probably one of the easiest setups UNLESS you choose a ready made online store service. Generally these cost a monthly fee and will siphon a percentage of each sale.
Social media integration - depends on how you might want to utilize it.
SEO - this is normally an ongoing process and can take several months. As a matter of fact, SEO should be constant
Hope all this helps. Message me with any questions.
May 7, 2014
It depends how you define "involved." ;) I would say that it's going to take quite a bit of work because you have to either match the CMS site to the HTML site or the reverse. Then decide if you want the cart on the CMS area or HTML area. Or maybe the best approach is to ditch the HTML for CMS. I would have to take a look at what you want to do to be more specific.
May 7, 2014
As people say, there are a million ways to get rich, it would be similar in this situation. From a birds eye view, it's not difficult as there are frameworks out there that promises these features. However, with clients from UN and Unicef where they often require a minimum of three languages and ecommerce clients that require international shipping, I would say it varies greatly depending upon the details of your product(s), and what other function and features in addition to a shopping cart. Someone mentioned WP as a solution, and it's a fine solution to use a plugin like WPML. From our experience, unfortunately, it's not a simple plug and play solution as one might think due to the project parameters and client objectives.
Of course, without any prior knowledge or even a competitor site to refer to, you might simply be just looking for a down and dirty shopping cart and a few pages of brochureware copy to round out the site. In that case, it might be easier rather than harder.
As usual, the devil is in the details :)
Ka Pang, Creative Director \ VolumeSquared
May 7, 2014
Todd,
I agree with Elaine: Saving the old HTML is like taking the worn tires off your ford and putting them on your new BMW, they will be the weak point of failure when anything goes wrong.
There are many systems that include all of the functionality that you need. Be warned: International sales are much more complicated than national ones, from a tax, shipping and even legal perspective.
Also, as Amy above said, the SEO SEM part is probably best left to an impartial expert who does just that.
For the different languages: Yes, you can use something like Google translate to dynamically translate your text, but to a native speaker that is a viable but not optimal option. New York/Puerto Rican Spanish is very different from Spain spanish, which are all different from latin american spanish, for example. Or more directly: India english versus Scotland english, versus texas english.
If foreign markets are critical to your business, you will likely want to hire a translator who will localize the text to that specific market.
Good luck!
May 7, 2014
Todd, I am in the process of migrating an HTML site to a Word Press platform, which allows us to take full advantage of the rich CMS features, plus all of the plug-ins available to those that use WordPress. This would include social media integration and shopping carts.
There are definitely plug-ins for language translation, but international sales isn't as straightforward as just a straight machine translation. Often a site can be in another language. This is easy, but the database (e.g. your inventory descriptions) may still be in English.
What kind of site is this?
May 7, 2014
Hi Todd,
Typically for a web development team, it would take a couple of months -
a) for gathering all your business needs
b) transform them to technical needs
c) build a wireframe to get approval on the overall layout, flow and theme
d) develop, test and deploy the new site
The cost could be starting $5000 depending on the security aspects, third party tools used, features list you have in mind, mobility aspects (its a must), etc.
Hope this addresses your query
Best,
Sri