ivantohelpyou

Here's another SmallBizResource post, inspired by my work with ShopSite, an e-commerce platform.

If you're a Web 2.0 designer or developer, what would you rather do? Take the time to figure out what's going on in a legacy site so that you can carefully make small adjustments and improvements in order to bring it up to current standards? Nah, that's too time-consuming and expensive, and the client isn't really interested when the current site works reasonably well already. It's much more lucrative to find virgin territory, or get a client willing and eager to do a tear-down.

I first selected ShopSite to get the online retail store for UbU Clothing off the ground quickly, but now that I've got that old-time Web Standards religion, I'll have to dig into and rewrite the ShopSite custom templates in order to get it just the way it oughta be.

The ShopSite templating system cranks out table-based layouts using an extremely limited set of proprietary tags. For example, within a template you can write [-- IF variable --] to test if variable has been defined, or [-- IF variable constant --] to test if variable = constant, but you can't test for inequalities, substrings, compare two variables, or anything else we've been able to do since the days of FORTRAN. The result is cut-and-paste spaghetti code that's really difficult to understand.

So I'm working on a workaround. There have GOT to be other ShopSite users that want to be able to modify their sites without working with these ridiculous templates or having to hire one of the cabal of about a dozen gurus who know how to modify these ridiculous templates.

Labels: ShopSite, web design, Web Standards