Choosing a website platform for your business

[Kay]

Here's a nice little article about choosing a platform.
http://www.business.com/blog/choosin...form-business/

They seem to have included the most obvious ones. Did they miss any that you'd have added to the list?

I thought it was quite useful (probably for a beginner) in as much as their list gave you the names for where to start looking. But if I were seriously looking to find a suitable platform for my business, I'd have wanted a lot more info. That's often the problem with lists. That's all they are - just lists. Even so, lists are apparently very popular and great for getting traffic. Very easy to write too! It doesn't exactly take much work to write a list. I'm kinda surprised that business.com would publish content that looks like it took 10 minutes to write.

Anyway, what platforms are you guys using? What's good and bad about them?

[Chabrenas]

I agree that it's a pretty trivial article, other than being a list of the most popular platforms. The pros & cons are pretty basic, and it doesn't point out that there is a world of difference between the skills needed to develop and maintain a site using one of the eCommerce platforms they list, and using Joomla or Drupal. Neither does it point out that sites require a considerable amount of maintenance, thanks to the rapid development of new user devices, and to the number of security updates that are released each year.

It would have been far more appropriate to discuss DIY vs professional site development and maintenance first. Platforms that give you an interface for designing page layouts and uploading product data in return for a hefty commission on your turnover are not quite as expensive as they first appear to be.

I have worked through all the eCommerce platforms they list, and found each of them incapable of coping with one or another aspect of my existing site. The commonest problems were with the carts, which could not cope with the full range of UK addresses (Isle of Man, Channel Islands, etc.,) or the niceties of VAT when selling worldwide. I've gone back to hunting for mobile-responsive templates to use with my existing php/mySQL implementation.