Twerp28

I am brand spanking new to this forum, but it looks like a completely all encompassing place to post my problems.

Before I get straight to the meat of my problem, I'll give you a little back story. This past December I had a few days off from work and whilst teaching myself Illustrator produced a few designs. I thought the designs were pretty cool so I showed them to some friends at the local sports car club. I got some great feedback so I showed them to some people at a car forum I frequent, they also loved the design and suggested I print T-shirts. So I did, I printed 50, I'm pretty happy about the quality but I've identified some mistakes and I know what I'll do different in the future.

Anyways due to interest in the shirts and my interest in entrepreneurship, I feel a niche automotive T-Shirt shop would be a great first business, it's extremely low risk.

So here lies my dilemma, I'm a designer. I'm not good with rules, or math, and definitely not html or php. I'm proficient in Photoshop and getting pretty good at Illustrator, I'm slowly teaching myself Dreamweaver but I fell asleep in Algebra II I don't know why I thought I could get through my Dreamweaver manual the size of a cinderblock! I do have two friends who are network administrators and if there is one thing I've learned from them it's that Programmers are mostly poor designers and designers are mostly bad programmers. So should I keep my nose to the grindstone with Dreamweaver and build my site from the ground up and pay for a cart and database software, or is there a easier way I can create a site specific to my design with someone elses backend. That's all I care about, that I have control over site layout and content.

I just don't want to waste my time. What would you experienced T-Shirt peddlers suggest?

Also, I mocked-up a homepage I'll post that up as well

 

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splathead

While dreamweaver is an excellent site development tool, it is not in the top 10 choices of developing an online store. Mainly because it does not have it's own cart. You'll have to use someone else's.

For a turnkey solution you could look at sites like Big Cartel Bringing the Art to the Cart. It also allows for tweaking the code to make your site look any way you want.

Otherwise, you could look at true shopping cart solutions like zencart, cubecart, oscommerce, etc. With those, you can design your own front end, like the example you gave above.

If you haven't already, browse the ecommerce site design forum here for additional info and suggestions.

 

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Twerp28

I've checked out a few template sites before and never really liked them too much. Reminded me of those subdivisions where every house looks the same but with slightly different shutters. I'm liking that Big Cartel site though, I can use my domain, and control the site design. Plus it has a flat fee which is always good.

And for a simple site like I'm envisioning it'd be great.

 

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