Actinic Catalog, osCommerce or bespoke ecommerce?
Written 21.03.06 by: Jonathan Briggs
Choosing the right tools for building a web site or an ecommerce store can be a hard choice. What are the real advantages of coming to a web design agency such as the OTHER media? There are cheaper options around. Are they really inferior?
I took part in an interesting experiment for .net magazine this month. Oliver Lindberg of .net created a set of images and descriptions and asked three small agencies to create a site: one using Actinic Catalog, one using the open source toolkit osCommerce and one built from scratch.
My role was to evaluate the resulting sites according to their designs, flexibility, search engine optimisation and level of control offered.
It was clear from the prototypes produced how relatively straightforward it was to build a site using either Actinic or osCommerce. Both of the prototypes were competently designed and functional, but both were severely constrained by their parentage. The tools dictate both functionality and form and it is clear from even a cursory look that these sites were built using these tools.
The "build from scratch" option was more flexible but in the time available, the designer had found it impossible to implement administration tools that would really allow the site to be controlled. This was in contrast with the Actinic and osCommerce versions which both come with extensive CMS/administration systems.
So this is the dilemma of low cost web site and ecommerce construction; either the tool shows through or the flexibility is constrained.
the OTHER media has been designing sites for over 8 years and have experimented with most of the tools and technologies out there including osCommerce and Actinic Catalog. Both definitely have their place in the market and can provide useful starting points for retailers on a tight budget.
We took the decision however that the sorts of clients we work for need something different. They want to create stores that have unique designs and customer experiences and that are flexible enough to extend and control over time.
We developed our own suite of software components, OTHERobjects for content management and OTHERcommerce for ecommerce, that can be highly customised for an individual client without forcing the sites to have a particular look or set of templates. This provides the advantages of using a tried and tested solution while responding to the unique needs of each brand or organisation.