AMember
AMember is probably the most popular choice for managing a membership site. It is ideally suited for sites that sell digital downloads. A built in two-tier affiliate program is included, as well as many other features including free installation, easy web-based administration, automated signups and expirations and more. The price of AMember is $179.95.

WishList Member WordPress Plugin
WishList Member is a premium plugin that can help you build a membership site powered by WordPress. It allows you to establish multiple levels of membership and features easy member management, secure RSS feeds, and much more. Because it is a WordPress plugin, installation is quick and easy. A single-site licnese costs $97 and a multi-site (unlimited) license is $297.

Instant Member
Instant Member allows you to set up multiple levels of membership and includes an affiliate program, plus loads of other features. You can set up coupon codes and trial memberships. The price is a one-time fee of $147.

Easy Member Pro
Easy Member Pro includes a wide range of features for managing your membership site, the rights to use it on unlimited domains, and a built-in affiliate program to promote your membership site. It includes a content management system, templates for page layouts, plus all the features needed for member management. The cost is a one-time payment of $97.

ProfileManagerPremium
ProfileManagerPremium includes many features for membership sites including, newsletters for your members, member profiles, multiple membership types, and much more. One unique feature is that members can upload pictures, video or other content. The cost is $199 and includes free installation.

SubHub
SubHub is managed software that will allow you to set up a membership site that includes articles, forums, audio and video, and downloads. It includes a content management system and a single administration panel to manage the site. The cost is $97 per month or $997 per year (14-day free trial is available).

MemberSmart Pro
MemberSmart Pro is fully-featured membership software that includes unlimited levels of membership, email administration, payment and income reports, and more. WordPress and Joomla pulgins are available. The cost of MemberSmart Pro is $179, or $249 for MemberSmart Pro plus a WordPress or Joomla plugin.

MemberWing
MemberWing is a premium plugin for using WordPress to power your membership site. It includes a number of features including gradual content delivery (release content accoring to how long people have been members), four levels of membership, lightweight and easy to install. There is a limited free version of the plugin available and prices range from $99.95 to $295.

YourMembers WordPress Plugin
YourMembers is a WordPress plugin that allows you to create a membership site using WordPress and PayPal or ClickBank. It includes the ability to make part of any post private to members, private RSS feeds, and free trial access. A single-site license costs $50 and a developer’s license is $200.

WP Member
WP Member is another premium plugin for WordPress. WP Member allows you to restrict access to pages and posts based on membership level (you can set up unlimited membership levels) and it will automatically manage users, subscriptions and payments. A one-site license costs $44.99 with additional options for multi-site licenses.

Wild Apricot
Wild Apricot provides all of the features needed to run your membership site, plus email newsletter tools, blogs and forums, event registration and more. There is a free ad-supported version available limited features. Other plans $25 monthly to $200 monthly.

Extreme Member
Extreme Member uses WordPress to manage membership websites. It includes a lot of features including use of coupon codes, multiple membership levels, built-in autoresponders, an affiliate module (depending on the plan you purchase), and more. Pricing ranges from $19-$99 per month.

YourMembership.com
YourMembership.com is a complete membership management system that is marketed towards alumni programs, association, chambers of commerce, government agencies, non-profit organizations, and other such groups. It’s a full-feature system that is more than needed for many entrepreneurs or small businesses that are interested in setting up a membership site. Pricing includes a one-time setup fee of $1,495 (which includes site design) and $5,995 annually.

MemberGate
MemberGate is another advanced option that provides tons of features, more than most small websites will need. The price starts at $3,995 and goes up from there. Included in the price is site design, a built in affiliate program, credit card processing, unlimited member plans, content management, and much more.

Things to Consider When Deciding on Membership Software:

With a wide selection to choose from, there is no solution that is right for everyone. As you are evaluating your options, here are some things to keep in mind that will help you to make the right decision for your situation.

Monthly Pricing vs. One-Time Payments

If you’re trying to compare the prices of various membership site solutions be sure that you understand the difference between those that charge one-time fees and those that charge monthly/recurring fees. Generally, if you purchase a license for a one-time fee you will be hosting it yourself with whatever web host you choose, and if you purchase one that involves monthly payments it will probably include hosting.

Features

There is a very wide variety of features available for the various options that are covered in this post. Of course, the price is also reflective of the features that are included. It’s a good idea to visit the various sites and read through the features that are included, then make a list of those that are necessary for your own needs. Once you know the features that you need or want you can narrow down your choices and compare prices accordingly. Try not to be distracted by features that are impressive, but might not be of any use to you.

CMS

If you are building a membership section on an already-existing website, are you currently using a content management system for that site? If you’re using WordPress you will have several plugins to choose from, and Joomla also presents some options to keep the membership section of the site on the CMS.

Many of the options that were listed above include some type of content management system of their own, and several make use of WordPress. Part of your decision should be based on the CMS that you want to use for your membership site.

Support

Most of the options listed above include some type of support. In some cases there may be a forum available, and for others you may have email support, but only for a limited amount of time. Generally, the plans that involve monthly payments also include some type of ongoing support. If you think it’s likely that you will need support, make sure this factors in to your decision and that you are comfortable with the support that will be available from the option that you choose.

Multiple Websites

You may want to build a membership site on one domain, or you may have several websites that are possibilities for memberships. Additionally, designers and developers may be interested in selling membership sites to clients. Most of the options listed here will provide some choices that allow you to choose bewteen a single-site license or a multi-site license.

What’s Your Experience?

If you would like to share your experience with any membership site software please leave a comment.

Related Posts:

• 37 Shopping Cart Options for Developers
• 25 jQuery Image Gallery/Slider Tutorials and Plugins
• How to Set Up Your First Site with LightCMS
• Style Switchers Showcase and Resources

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In this post we’ll look at a number of sites that are using style switchers and you’ll see screenshots to demonstrate how the site will appear with various options selected. At the end of the post there is also a resources section with tutorials and scripts that can help if you are interested in using a style switcher on your site.

Carreras con Futuro

Carreras con Futuro uses a hand-drawn background image with splatter effects. The style switcher changes the color of the splatters, and also changes the color of a few elements in the site’s content area, such as the background of “login.”

Joshua Piersanti

Joshua Piersanti’s portfolio site includes a style switcher that flips between a day and a night theme. Obviously the background image changes, as does the color of the text to contrast the changing background. At the right edge of the screen is a light switch that is used to change the style – up for day and down for night.

Absolute Bica

The Absolute Bica portfolio site uses a large, nature-inspired background image. The style switcher allows visitors to chose a time of day: sunrise, afternoon, sunset, or night.

ANidea

The style switcher on ANidea allows visitors to choose from ten different background images (four are shown below). The various background images are large and most use vibrant colors.

Webstaze

The Webstaze portfolio site offers visitors the option of choosing a season-based theme. All four seasons are represented by a background image (all are shown below).

Jason Bradbury

Jason Bradbury’s blog allows visitors to choose the color scheme of the blog through the “choose a color” option at the top of the sidebar. Below you will see screenshots of the red and blue schemes. The background image is not changed based on this selection but it does change randomly (when you are on the site refresh the page). There are several different backgrounds that will appear randomly (a green textured background is also shown below) and each one offers visitors the opportunity to choose a color.

Impulse Design

Impulse Design uses a style switcher to give visitors the option of changing background images. There are to choices, both are shown below.

eAnka

The eAnka portfolio site uses a nature-inspire illustration as a header and background of the site. The style switcher gives visitors the choice to view the daytime or nighttime version, both shown below.

Marius Roosendaal

Marius Roosendaal’s site offers three different themes to choose from: day, night and sunrise. Each has a textured background and the text colors change appropriately as well (all three are shown below).

POPURLS

POPURLS offers visitors a lot of different customization options. For starters you can choose a light background or a dark background (both shown below). There are also options for how you would like the content to be displayed. The third image below is from the “river” option.

Best Web Gallery

Nick La’s popular gallery site Best Web Gallery offers three different options for displaying the layout. You can choose thumbnails, full, or details (all are shown below).

Hutch House

The Hutch House portfolio site gives visitors the option to select one of four different themes: jungle, space, night, and depth (all shown below).  Hutch House uses a different approach than most of the sites on this list, part of the content also changes based on the theme.

Style Switcher Resources for Developers:

Here are some resources that may be helpful for you in your own design and development:

Easy Display Switch with CSS and jQuery
A tutorial by Soh Tanaka on DesignM.ag that shows how you can achieve a similar effect as Best Web Gallery to give visitors layout options.

Stylesheet Switcher Using jQuery
Get the code for a jQuery style switcher from Kelvin Luck.

CSS Style Switcher – Design Shack
This is a quick tutorial from Design Shack that provides code for a style switcher.

Build Your Own PHP Style Sheet Switcher
456 Berea Street has a nice tutorial that you can use to create a style switcher.

Style Sheet Switcher from Dynamic Drive
Here is a script provided by Dynamic Drive.

CSS Style Theme Switcher
e-ss.be provides this script that you can download in use in your own work.

For more web development articles please see:

• 25 jQuery Image Gallery/Slider Tutorials and Plugins
• 37 Shopping Cart Options for Web Developers
• How to Set Up Your First Site with LightCMS

Looking to Hire a Designer or Developer?

Post a free job listing to the DesignM.ag job board for freelance, part-time or full-time positions. Your listing will be seen by thousands of talented designers and developers. - Post a job for free.

jQuery Image Gallery/Slider Tutorials:

Create an Image Rotator with Description (CSS/jQuery)

jQuery Image Gallery/News Slider with Caption

Full Screen Image Gallery Using jQuery and Flickr

Create a Slick and Accessible Slideshow Using jQuery

Fancy Thumbnail Hover Effect with jQuery

Simple jQuery Image Slideshow with Semi Transparent Caption

Slider Gallery

Building a jQuery Image Scroller

Sliding Boxes and Captions with jQuery

Create Beautiful jQuery Slider

How to: Create a Fancy Image Gallery with jQuery

Coda Slider Effect

jQuery Image Gallery/Slider Plugins:

Supersized

Galleria

Gallery View

jQuery lightBox

Gallerific

Easy Slider 1.5

Pikachoose

S3 Slider – jQuery Image Gallery

Sliding Image Gallery

Flickr Gallery

Simple Controls Image Gallery

Popeye

Smooth Div Scroll

For more web development content please see:

• 37 Shopping Cart Options for Web Developers
• 25 Scripts for Dropdown Navigation Menus
• How to Set Up Your First Site with LightCMS

Looking to Hire a Designer or Developer?

Post a free job listing to the DesignM.ag job board for freelance, part-time or full-time positions. Your listing will be seen by thousands of talented designers and developers. - Post a job for free.

In this post I’d like to present some basic information about LightCMS and provide a tutorial for getting a simple website working with the basic features of LightCMS. This is a very simple tutorial that only covers the basics of the system, but hopefully it will be helpful to learn a little bit more about LightCMS in case it can be of use to you and your clients.

Intro to LightCMS:

LightCMS is a content management system created by Element Fusion. Since there are a ton of CMS options out there (see CMS Toolbox) it’s important to know what LightCMS is and what it is not before getting into the tutorial.

LightCMS is intended to be an excellent solution for both designers and clients. In order to use LightCMS on a website, the site will have to be hosted on their servers. As a designer you can sign up to be a reseller and use the system on your clients’ websites.

Everything is fully brandable, so it will appear to be your own CMS rather than your clients knowing that it is going through LightCMS/Element Fusion. As a reseller you will be able to offer your clients a powerful and user-friendly content management system and hosting package, and you’ll receive a commission on those monthly payments. The rates can be adjusted by the designer, but the suggested retail prices start at $29 per month and go up from there. The package needed will be determined by factors like the number of pages on the site, the amount of disk space, and the number of users.

LightCMS includes a lot of useful features, such as blogs, photo galleries, a form builder, event calendars, RSS feeds, sitewide search, online donations and more. Once the site is created, users can login and easily and quickly make changes to their pages, add new elements and add new pages.

Of course, like any other CMS, it is great for some clients but not the perfect fit for all situations. Hopefully this article will help you to get more familiar with LightCMS in order to determine if it could be of use to you and your clients.

Benefits to Designers:

Because the emphasis from LightCMS is signing up designers as resellers in order to ultimately get more business, you can expect that there will be some significant benefits for designers who use LightCMS.

1 – Residual Income

As a reseller you’ll have the opportunity to make some recurring income on the monthly fees that clients are paying to use the system. The suggested retail rates include a 35% markup, so if your client is paying $29 you will make $10, if your client is paying $49 you will make $20, and so on. If you’re adding new clients regularly you can see that this would add up over time.

2 – Support

One of the major headaches that discourages many designers from being hosting resellers is that there is often added responsibility in terms of customer service. With LightCMS you can provide customers with their support email address if it is something that you can’t take care of or don’t have time to deal with.

3 – No Design Restrictions

LightCMS works by using editable regions in specific places on the page where you want them to appear. As a result, you can create any type of design you like and simply insert a small piece of code to allow clients the ability to edit the page. You won’t be held back in terms of design because of the system.

4- Free to Become a Reseller

There are no sign up fees or other costs involved with becoming a reseller. You can sign up for free and see how you like the system. Maybe you’ll like it enough to use with all of your clients, or maybe you’ll only want to use it every now and then in the right situation. Either way, it won’t cost you anything to become a reseller.

5 – Private-Labeled

You can replace the LightCMS branding with your own to give clients a consistent experience with you and your company.

6 – Free Websites

Since LightCMS needs to be hosted on their servers, you won’t be able to set up a test site on another server while you learn the system or while you’re developing a site for a client. However, they offer an unlimited number of free websites with certain limitations. Free sites can have up to 3 pages, which is enough to use for testing the system out and start working on a client site. If/when you want to upgrade it’s an easy process.

7 – Marketing Materials

As a reseller of LightCMS you will have access and approval to use their marketing materials on your own website, including a feature list, a pricing grid, and videos.

Benefits to Clients:

1 – A Feature-Rich CMS

While there are other CMS options out there to chose from, including a number of free choices, LightCMS gives users easy access to a lot of features. In some cases, the features that are standard with LightCMS could be built on another CMS, but they may take more customization or development work, and ultimately more money.

2 – Easy to Use

With LightCMS, clients will login to their site and edit right from the page. They can easily change existing content, and they can also add new elements, such as text areas, blogs, photo galleries, event calendars and forms.

3 – Support

One of the down sides to using a free CMS for clients is a lack of support. In many cases there will be forums or documentation, but since LightCMS is both a hosting account and a CMS, clients can get support from Element Fusion.

4 – Includes Hosting

Although free content management systems are available, clients will be paying for hosting in one way or another. Of course, prices will vary greatly according to the needs of the client, but in some cases the cost of using LightCMS for clients will be comparable to what they would be paying just for hosting.

How to Set Up Your First Site with LightCMS:

As I mentioned earlier, you can set up an unlimited number of free websites, which is a great way to get familiar with LightCMS before using it on a client website. The basics of the system are very simple and easy to grasp, but you’ll also want to get familiar with the code output so you know how to style it appropriately, and so you know what is possible with the system.

In this tutorial we’re going to walk through the process of signing up for a free 3-page website and setting it up with LightCMS. First, go to the Reseller page and you’ll see a button at the top that says “sign up now.”

Clicking on that button will lead you to a simple form where you can create your first site. Your free site will be at publishpath.com (although you can change that later), so you’ll enter the name for your site, such as http://tutorialsite.publishpath.com.

You’ll then be asked for your name, email address and phone number (email address is all that is required). After that you’ll set a password, check the box to agree to the terms, and you should see this confirmation message.

You can then click the login link, enter your email address and your password and you will see the dashboard of your website.

Unlike most other content management systems, when you are logged in you are actually seeing your website, plus some additional options. For example, here is what the default design will look like to anyone who is not logged in.

When you’re logged in, you’ll see all the necessary admin navigation at the top of the page, and also in relevant sections that have been defined as editable. For example, at the top of the page you will see links such as “page settings” and “add new page.”

In the body of the page you’ll see links like “text” and “add element.”

These links will show up wherever the page has an editable region in the code. There are a few different types of “tokens” that are key to sites using LightCMS, editable regions being the one that is used the most commonly.

By placing the code for an editable region in a specific location of a page, the user will be able to add a number of different elements in that location, including a text box, a blog, an event calendar, a form, and more. Where you are seeing the link “text”, a text box has already been set up in that editable region. To change the text in that box you’ll simply click on the word “text” and it will open the WYSIWYG editor.

To demonstrate how the system works, we will take a basic template, make some changes so it is usable with LightCMS, upload it, and start adding some content. I will be working with the CleanBiz Template from ThemeForest for this tutorial. This process will show you what is involved with taking an existing design and putting on LightCMS. Of course, the core concepts can also be used to create a site from scratch specifically for LightCMS.

Before getting started with LightCMS, I recommend that you check out some of their documentation about uploading your own designs. This gives some important details about what will need to be included with a template in order for it to work.

Your designs can have an unlimited number of templates for use with LightCMS. This is great for customizing a particular page or for building a larger site where you don’t want every page to look the same. There are three templates that we will be using for this basic site that we are creating:

1 – Admin Template - Controls the admin dashboard.

2 – Homepage Template

3 – Inside Template – Controls the secondary pages.

The design must have an admin template and a homepage template for it to work, others can be used as needed. We’ll start with the homepage. The homepage template must be named “home.html” and it must have at least one editable region, named “MainContent.” Other editable regions can be named however you choose.

To start with, we’ll open up the index.html file in the CleanBiz template and rename it home.html so it is compatible with LightCMS.

The main content section on the homepage of this template starts with the H2 “Sample Article 1.”

The token for an editable region named MainContent is:

We want the whole area in the main content area to be editable. For now we will delete the content in the template and leave only the editable region in it’s place. The H2 tags and paragraphs were contained in a div with an id of “content” so we will leave the div and the code will now be as follows:

In the right sidebar of the template there is also a section “Something About Me.” We’re also going to get rid of this content and make that region editable by entering the following code:

Now our homepage is titled home.html, and it has editable regions, including MainContent, so it is ready to go.

Next, we need to create an admin template, so we’ll create a new file called admin.html. The only requirement of an admin template is that it must have an editable region, MainContent, and the editable region must be more than 600 pixels wide. Of course, you can get more creative if you want to, but to meet the basic needs we will use the following code in our admin.html file:

In the CSS file for the template we’ll need to style this div so that it is at least 600 pixels wide, so we’ll add the following code to the CSS file:

That takes care of the needs for both our homepage and our admin template, so now we’ll create a template for the secondary pages. We’ll create a file called inside.html. The CleanBiz template comes with a few secondary pages, including an about page.

We’ll use this about page as the basis for our template for secondary pages. So we’ll copy all of the code from about.html and paste it into inside.html which we just created.

Like the homepage, this about page also contains the main content in a div with an id of “content,” so we will leave the div there but delete all of the content. In it’s place we’ll enter the code for an editable region called MainContent:

Next, we’ll do the same thing that we did for the homepage by deleting out the content in the “Something About Me” section, and add an editable region called AboutMe:

Now, we’re ready to upload our design and move forward. In order to upload the design we will need to zip the files. After you have zipped the folder containing all of your files, go back to your webiste’s dashboard, hover over the “My Website” link at the top of the page, and click on “Designs.” This will bring you to the design manager where you can make changes to an existing design or upload a new one.

Click on “Upload a new design” and browse to find you zip file. Then click on upload. You should then get a message that your upload is complete, and it will include a link to the “My Designs” page. Click on “My Designs”. Here you will see the options that are available to you, which includes the one that was just uploaded and the default design that is active.

If you click on CleanBiz (or whatever your other design is named) it will open a few options. Click on “apply” to use this design on your site. You’ll then be directed to the dashboard where you will see the homepage with all of the admin options.

If you click on the “preview page” link it will remove the dashboard links and you’ll see it as a visitor would, except it has a small bar at the top that includes a link to go back to the admin view.

You’ll notice that the main content area of the page still includes the filler content that was on the default design when the free site was created. Since that design also used the editable region named MainContent, the contents of that editable region will show up wherever we use an editable region with the same name. For example, if you switched the names of the two editable regions that we set up and put the MainContent region in the sidebar, this content would show up at that spot in the sidebar. Since the original design had no editable region named AboutMe, that region is blank for now.

Now let’s get the site back to what it looked like in the original Clean Biz template. To start with, from the dashboard, click on the link “text” above the main content area.

When you click on that link you will be led to a WYSIWYG editor where you can change the content of that region.

We want to highlight all of this welcome text and delete it. If you remember from earlier in the tutorial, the homepage of the CleanBiz template included a blog-like area with two headlines and article excerpts. So to get the same end result, I’ll click on the HTML tab at the bottom of the WYSIWYG editor and paste the original code from the homepage of the CleanBiz template:

Once the code is pasted in, click “update” and the page will be saved. Now we have the “Sample Article” section that comes with the CleanBiz template, but it’s now editable through LightCMS.

Now let’s move on to the sidebar. In the area where we designated the editable region AboutMe, you’ll see a link with a green icon to add an element.

Click on that link and you’ll be able to choose what type of element you want to add. We’re going to select “text”. Then click “add.”

You’ll see the following message that the text element is blank.

Click on the word “text” and the WYSIYG editor will open. Now we’ll be pasting the code from the CleanBiz sidebar (minus the code for the photo) into the text area.

Next, we’ll upload the photo. Place your cursor before the first paragraph.

Click on the Image Manager icon.

Click on “upload.”

Find the picture you want to upload on your computer.

Click “Insert.” The original CleanBiz template uses align=”right” on the image, so we can click on the HTML tab of the WYSIWYG editor and add that code to the image. Then click update. Now if you click on “preview page” you’ll see this.

The site now looks like the original CleanBiz template, but it has two editable regions.

Now we’ll create an About page, so click on “add a new page.”

Now we’ll enter the page title and the filler text for the about page.

Click “update” and the page now looks like this.

It still needs the sidebar content to be complete, so click on “add element” in the sidebar.

Click on “copy an element from another part of your site.”

Open the drop down menu and select the AboutMe section from the homepage.

The sidebar on the about page now shows the same content as the sidebar from the homepage. When you edit the content in this section of the homepage it will also change on the about page.

So we now have a homepage and an about page with editable content. This is just a very basic tutorial, there is a lot more that we could do in terms of working with the editable regions, but this post is already getting pretty long. If there is sufficient interest, I could do a second tutorial that covers the process of setting up some other features, like a blog and an event calendar. If you’d like to see that, please leave a comment.

Do You Have Any Experience with LightCMS?

If you have ever worked with LightCMS please share your thoughts of the CMS in the comments. While my experience with LightCMS is very limited, I do think it could be a great option for some projects. It’s pretty easy to work with from a design perspective, and I think the features will justify the cost for many clients.

Looking to Hire a Designer or Developer?

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You may want to choose an open source option that you can learn well in order to build a number of different client websites. Or, your client may want to go with a hosted or licensed option that can be up and running quickly. In this post we’ll look at more than 30 different options, provide some basic details, and point you in the right direction for getting more information to make a good decision.

If you don’t already have a preferred e-commerce system to work with, be sure to do some homework or experimentation before making any important decisions that could be difficult to change later.

If you work on a lot of e-commerce websites, you may be interested in our new gallery site CartFrenzy, which showcases well-designed e-commerce sites.

Open Source Shopping Carts and E-Commerce Options:

There are a number of open source options that are popular with developers.

Magento

Magento is a leading open source solution. It is a full-featured e-commerce platform with lots of options for users.

For further reading:

• Magento Commerce – A First Look
• Magento eCommerce Review: Platform Perils and Impressions, Three Months In
• The PeC Review: Magento is the Open Source Powerhouse

osCommerce

osCommerce is one of the most popular open source shopping carts. osCommerce was started in 2000 and has a community of over 200,000 users. Others like Zen Cart and CRE Loaded are based on osCommerce.

For further reading:

• osCommerce Review
• osCommerce vs. Zen Cart
• osCommerce vs. Magento
• eCommerce Wars: Magento vs. osCommerce

Zen Cart

Zen Cart is a popular free, open source shopping cart.

For further reading:

• Zen Cart Review
• Cube Cart vs. Zen Cart
• The Disciples of osCommerce, Zen and CRE Loaded

PrestaShop

PrestaShop is a free, open source shopping cart (PHP).

For further reading:

• Free PHP E-Commerce Software: PrestaShop

Other Open Source Options:

Agora Cart

Ubercart

Free Shopping Carts:

In addition to the open source options, these shopping carts will keep costs to a minimum.

PayPal

PayPal provides a very popular free shopping cart system (they take a percentage of sales with no monthly fees). You can create “Add to Cart” or “Buy Now” buttons and accept payments from credit cards as well as payments from PayPal balances.

For further reading:

• PayPal Software Review
• PayPal Online Payment System Review

Google Checkout

Google Checkout is payment processing system (can be used with other shopping carts or with their own) that is free to use for AdWords users. There are small per-transaction fees for those who aren’t using AdWords.

For further reading:

• Google Checkout Online Software and Service Reviews
• Google Checkout vs. PayPal

e-Commerce WordPress Plugin

Websites and blogs powered by WordPress can download the e-commerce plugin. It doesn’t offer all of the features of a complete e-commerce solution (although it does have quite an impressive feature list for a plugin), but it may be ideal for smaller stores.

For further reading:

• 10 Powerful Shopping/E-Commerce Plugin Solutions for WordPress
• WordPress eCommerce Plugins: Shopp vs. WP e-Commerce

eShop WordPress Plugin

eShop is another option for WordPress users.

For further reading:

• Become a Seller with eShop for WordPress Plugin
• How to: Turn Your WordPress Blog to an Online Shop

FatFreeCart

FatFreeCart is a free option from the makers of E-Junkie. It works with PayPal and Google checkout and does not require installing anything.

Other Free Shopping Carts:

StoreSprite

Quick.Cart

Virtue Mart (for Joomla and Mambo)

Hosted and Licensed E-Commerce Options:

Many clients may not want to go with a free or open source option. Here are some of the leading choices for hosted and licensed e-commerce.

Network Solutions

Network Solutions standard costs $50 per month, and the pro version costs $100 per month.

For further reading:

• Network Solutions Pro Review
• Network Solutions User Reviews

Yahoo! Small Business

Yahoo! Small Business’s starter e-commerce plan costs $40 per month.

For further reading:

• Yahoo Merchant Starter Review by PC Magazine

Shopify

Shopify is a hosted solution with prices that start at $24 per month. There are tons of features and ease of use is emphasized.

For further reading:

• Cart of the Week: Shopify
• Shopify Review

CRE Loaded

CRE Loaded pricing starts at $50 per month, or you can download and host it yourself for a one-time fee of $295.

• osCommerce vs. CRE Loaded vs. Zen Cart vs. Others

E-Junkie

E-Junkie provides shopping carts and buy now buttons for selling downloads and tangible goods. They automate the transfer of files and codes if you are selling downloads. Prices start at $5 per month.

For further reading:

• Review: E-Junkie is an Addicting Store Front Solution
• Review: E-Junkie E-Commerce Shopping Cart

CubeCart

CubeCart is a feature-rich PHP and MySQL shopping cart. The price ranges from free to $180.

For further reading:

• CubeCart vs. Zen Cart
• A Review of CubeCart 4
• CubeCart Review Update
• CubeCart 3.0 Review

3DCart

3DCart’s prices range from $20 to $100 per month for its hosted shopping cart.

For further reading:

• 3DCart Reviews
• 3DCart reviews on the WebProWorld forums

Interspire

Interspire costs $295, $995 or $1,795, depending on which edition you want.

For further reading:

• Interspire Shopping Cart Review
• Cart of the Week: Interspire “Obsesses Over Quality”

X-Cart

X-Cart is a PHP and MySQL shopping cart. X-Cart gold costs $229 and X-Cart Pro costs $575.

For further reading:

• X-Cart Pro Review
• X-Cart Review

FoxyCart

FoxyCart is free during development and then $15 per month. It aims to make the process of designing and developing an e-commerce site easy.

For further reading:

• Using FoxyCart for E-Commerce

Other Hosted and Licensed Options:

Big Cartel

Avactis

K eCommerce

AWD Commerce

StoreFront

1ShoppingCart

Volusion

eCRATER

Merchandizer

CS Cart

Miva Merchant

ShopSite

VP – ASP

WebmasterCart

If you’re interested in seeing some well-designed e-commerce sites, please see:

• 50 Inspirational E-Commerce Website Designs
• 25+ Inspirational E-Commerce Website Designs – Part Two

Looking to Hire a Designer or Developer?

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Each client has there own unique needs, and there may be times when you come across someone who is not interested in anything fancy, but they want a small website that will allow them to change the content of pages.

I do a good bit of work with WordPress, but for clients in this situation it’s not the best solution. Several of the non-tech-savvy clients that I’ve worked with have been intimidated by all of the options in WordPress, especially when they have no use for many of them.

For situations like this, Cushy CMS is an excellent option. With Cushy CMS you can easily give clients the access and ability to change content of a specific number of pages without everything else that they won’t need.

In this post we’ll walk through the process of setting up a website for a client to allow them access for editing. The basic version is of CushyCMS is free, and they also offer a pro account for $28 per month that gives you a branded version of the system so your clients won’t even know that it’s Cushy CMS. Everything we’ll be doing here is using the free version.

To put this into a real-world perspective, let’s assume the client is a service provider that needs a just a small website, maybe 5 pages, with basic information about the company and its services. There’s no need for them to be able to add new pages at this time, they just want to be able to keep the site up-to-date when information about the company changes.

For the purposes of this tutorial I decided to get a template from Theme Forest to use as the client site, and I’ve uploaded it to my site (of course, in the real world this would be at the clients URL, but for this tutorial we’ll just keep it at this domain). The template I’m using is Clean Biz.

Throughout the tutorial there will be many screen shots. If you want to see the full-size version, click on the screen shot.

Step 1: Create Your Account

If you have never used Cushy CMS before, you’ll need to create an account. With the account you’ll then be able to set up clients as “editors” and assign them the rights to edit their site. Creating the account is very easy, just go to the sign up page and enter your name, email and password.

Step 2: Add Site

Once you’re logged in, you’ll see the options to add a site or add an editor.

To start with, we’re going to add the site, so click on the “Add Site” button. On the next page you’ll enter the client’s URL and their FTP data. If you don’t have this information, you’ll need to get it from the client before you can get everything set up. Next to the “Path” field, click “Choose” and find the root folder. When you’re done, click on “Add Site” and it should tell you that it was a success.

Step 3: Assign Some Pages

Now that the site has been successfully added, we’re going to assign 3 pages that the client will be able to edit. Of course, you can do more or less depending on the clients needs. We’re going to assign the home page, about page, and services page. To do this, click on the link that says “Assign pages to site” (below the domain).

To do this you’ll enter the full URL of the page, give it a name that the client will understand, and select the path to the specific file as it is located on the server.

Now, repeat this step for however many pages you want to assign. In this case, I have done this for the home page, about page, and services page.

Step 4: Assign Editor

Now that we have the site and pages added, we’ll need to give the client access to these pages. As the designer, you’ll have access to everything that you set up, but you’ll be able to assign each client to specific sites. So if you have multiple clients using Cushy CMS, you’ll be able to access all, but they’ll only be able to access their own sites and pages.

After you complete step 3 you’ll be on a page that looks like the screen shot below. Click on the green button for “Add Editor.”

Here you’ll enter the client’s name and email address (they’ll be emailed the login information) and choose which sites and/or pages the editor will have access to. In this case we’re choosing all three of the pages that have been set up. When you’re done, click “Add Editor” at the bottom of the page.

After you’ve added the editor, you will see a message stating that it was a success. Now click on a link to one of the pages below. You’ll get an error message telling you that no editable elements have been defined. Cushy CMS works very simply. If an element, such as a div for example, has a class of “cushycms”, it will be editable. Nothing else will be editable. So, since we’ve uploaded a standard template we need to also add some classes to each of these pages to allow editing.

Step 5: Add cushycms Class

We’ll open up the index.html file and add a class  (class=”cushycms”) to the content div that contains all of the content in the main area of the page. You can also add title elements to make it more organized when editing, so we’ll add title=”home content”. Make sure that you add the class to an element that contains everything that needs to be edited. You can add multiple classes per page.

We’ll also do the same thing for the about page and the services page, and we’ll upload all of these pages to the server. I’m also going to add the class=”cushycms” to the sidebar of the services page so that we’ll be able to change the photo. (click on the image below to see a larger version). Now that the class has been entered, we’ll be able to edit anything that is in the content div. Back in Cushy CMS, click the try again button.

Step 6: Edit the Content

Now, we’ll select the services page from the list of pages that have been set up, and you’ll be able to edit.

You’ll notice here that it keeps the h2 tags and paragraph tags in tact. All of this is editable. New headers can be added, bold or italics can be applied to text, links can be added, etc. The basic functions you would expect are all there.

We’ll change the h2 tags to give specific information rather than Service 1, etc. We’ll also apply bold to a few words and insert a link.

When you’re done, click publish page.

Here is what the services page looked like before the edit.

Cushy CMS now interacts with the server and the changes will take effect. Below is a screen shot of the page after it has been edited.

Step 7: Change the Photo

It’s also nice for clients to be able to change photos from time-to-time, and since we added the cushycms class to the containing div, we’ll be able to update the photo in the sidebar of the services page.

So, we’ll choose the services page from the dashboard and we’ll see something like the screen shot below.

Now, if you click on the image to select it, and click on the button to add or edit an image (it’s a picture of a little tree next to the “insert table” option), you’ll be able to upload a photo to the server and add it to the page. Alternatively, if the image you want is already on the server you won’t have to upload it.

Click on the upload tab and browse to find the image that you want and click “send it to server.” The image is now uploaded and plopped in that spot of the page. Choose a width and enter it, the height will automatically be adjusted (or vice versa). Click “ok” and you’ll see the change.

We’ve now been able to update the text and the photo of the page.

In this case I have worked through the process while being logged in as the designer, but the client would be able to do the same things after they get their login information by email. So now they have a small website that they can easily maintain on their own without any technical knowledge.

At the Cushy CMS homepage they also have a brief video that walks you through the process, so be sure to check that out if you have any interest in using the CMS.

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For designers and developers selling premium themes can open up a whole new source of income and a different approach to earning a living in web design. If you’re currently designing sites for clients, you may want to look at the possibility of adding theme sales to your routine, as it brings a number of benefits.

The Basics of Theme Sales

Premium themes give customers the option to buy a high quality theme for a much lower price than they would have to pay for a custom design. Obviously, there are thousands of free themes (particularly for WordPress) available, but with so many blogs and websites using those themes, standing out requires something more unique. A custom design is ideal, but many website owners are hesitant to invest that kind of money into a site that may not be producing any income yet. Premium themes provide an extremely affordable option that gives them a look that they probably can’t achieve with a free theme.

Designers are able to sell premium themes for much less than they would charge for a custom design because they can sell it many times, so they’re not making all of the money from one customer, but rather from hundreds of customers. The designers and developers of premium themes typically will then offer support to customers who have purchased the theme and are having some problems.

Many times the site owner will make some minor customizations (such as a header image, logo, color scheme, etc.) to give the premium theme their own look, or they can pay a professional to customize it further, which will still usually wind up being cheaper than a full custom design.

Why Sell Premium Themes?

Income Potential

Those who sell popular themes (take for example Brian Gardner) make a good bit of money doing so. If a theme sells for $100 and you sell only 10 per month, that would equal $1,000 per month or $12,000 per year. Although there will be ongoing work providing support and marketing your theme, the potential income for a premium theme is much higher than you are likely to ever charge for a custom design.

Leverage Your Work

Creating a theme one time and selling it over and over again is a great way to leverage your work. You can continue to make money on your original efforts long after the design is completed.

Income Diversity

If you currently work as a freelancer or for a design firm, working for clients is your primary source of income. By selling themes you can add some diversity and make money in multiple ways.

Opportunity for More Work Customizing the Theme

Some theme designers/developers offer the option for customers to pay for their services to customize the theme specifically to them. These changes may be relatively minor, but it can provide some added work and income for you.

Less Design, More Business and Marketing

If you’re interested in spending less of your time actually designing, selling premium themes could be one option. By doing so you would be able to spend more of your time on the business aspects or marketing and selling your theme, which may or may not interest you.

Ben Harper and Templamatic:

Templamatic is a premium theme marketplace (WordPress themes, other CMS themes, and HTML/CSS templates) that was launched earlier this year by designer Ben Harper. Any theme developer can register for an account and start selling their themes through Templamatic. In recent months I’ve written a few blogs posts for Templamatic and I thought Ben would be able to provide some valuable information that would add to the subject of theme sales. Ben agreed to answer some questions for me, so I hope you’ll find the following interview to be helpful if you are considering selling some of your own themes.

What’s your background as a designer?

My initial interest in design started from my childhood dream of becoming an artist. In my early 20’s I was all about abstract painting. I had a job as a systems administrator, and was painting in my spare time. After rebuilding the company’s web server, I stumbled upon their website files and was immediately fascinated by the merger of information and design. I asked the CEO if I could redesign the website, and that was my first professional project. That was about 8 years ago, and I’ve been designing and building websites ever since. In the beginning, I was really trying to learn everything I could. I was sort of a jack of all trades, master of none. I dabbled in everything I could, including html, css, programming and database interaction. I worked for a web design agency in Boston for 4 years where I was exposed to a lot of new stuff. This is where I transitioned from a web producer into more of a web designer. At this point in my career, I find the most pleasure from working in Photoshop on a design, and then helping see it through to a finished product.

What was your motivation for starting Templamatic?

After working extremely hard for some one else for 4 years, I became infected with this notion that I could do it all on my own. I left the company and started freelancing. As my freelance business picked up speed, I knew that I wanted to build something different from a traditional web development company. I wanted to put everything I had learned into action. But, it’s not just about what I want. Templamatic was built to solve a lot of the common problems that all freelancers face. Templamatic takes a service business and makes it more of a product business. It gives you control over your time and effort by allowing you to build once, and sell repeatedly. When you can set your own price, and get paid before goods are delivered, you are in control. This is a great structure to have as an independent designer. As Templamatic grows, I really hope it can become an invaluable resource for up and coming designers and freelancers whose struggles I understand so well.

How can designers get their themes listed and sold through Templamatic?

It’s really quite easy. You just sign up for a free account on Templamatic and use our simple upload form to submit your design. The only requirements are that you provide valid html markup and original artwork so your design may be modified by the customers. We will review your work and add it to the site to sell.

What does Templamatic have to offer for theme designers?

First and for most, we offer you a chance to sell and profit from your work. We know how long it takes to make a great design, and we think designers should get paid for their time. When we setup the site, we looked across the industry at similar sites and were shocked to learn that most stock sites offer very small percentages to designers. To me, this seems like exploitation. As a designer, I wouldn’t be interested in selling my work on another site if I wasn’t getting a big cut of the action. So with that in mind, we are offering designers 65% royalties on every sale of their templates. In addition we are offering an extra 10% bonus royalties during our beta period as an incentive to early contributors. We also offer theme designers greater reach and exposure by placing their work in the Templamatic marketplace. We also offer full support to the end customers so that designers don’t have to worry about it. As the site and the community grows, we will continue to offer tools and information that will support both template designers and customers alike.

Where do you see the future of theme selling going?

There has been much talk lately on the internet about this very question, and it’s something I spend a great deal of time thinking about. On the one hand you have the creator of Wordpress saying all templates should be free and open source, but then on the other hand, you see the proliferation of theme sellers and marketplaces springing up. So it is an interesting market for sure. Without speculating on where the market is going, I can only say what we are going to do in the future. We are building tools that will make it much easier for non programmers to build themes that can be used on multiple platforms. We want people to spend more time creating unique and personal designs without worrying about the technology.

Did you personally design any of the themes being sold, or do you just focus on running the site?

I created some of them. But I mostly focus on running the site, and also running my service business to help fund Templamatic until it becomes self sufficient.

If designers have a theme listed for sale at Templamatic, can they also sell it somewhere else, or will it be exclusive to Templamatic?

We are not requiring content to be exclusive to Templamatic. You may sell your templates with us and else where as well. We do ask that you indicate whether your content is exclusive or not.

What is the payment structure for designers who sell themes?

For templates submitted during the beta period, designers will get 75% royalties on every sale, so submit your template today!

What’s Your Experience?

If you have any experience selling premium themes please share some of your thoughts in the comments. For everyone else, would you consider selling premium themes at any point in the future?

Looking to Hire a Designer or Developer?

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1 – Purpose

Every website needs a well-defined purpose. Website owners and bloggers who have a solid understanding of what they expect to get out of their site will be able to work backwards in order to determine how the site should be managed, what content should be included, what messages should be communicated to visitors, and really everything involved with developing and running a website.

Unfortunately, it’s pretty common for site owners to rush through the process of setting up a website and the true purpose is sometimes overlooked. Without knowing specifically what you hope to achieve, you will lack direction, your efforts will be scattered, and your chances of making a positive impact with your site will be poor.

A purpose should be fairly specific. Instead of saying “I want to improve my business by having a stronger presence online,” consider something like “My website will become the most consistent source of leads for my services and it will help me to improve communication with potential clients.” With the second purpose, you now know specifically what you want to achieve with your website, it’s just a matter of finding ways to make that happen.

The purpose of a website functions in essentially the same manner that a mission statement aids a business. It sets the tone for all of the activities and it gives a context that should be used to help in decision making. If your business already has a mission statement, I suggest also developing a separate purpose for your website. The website’s purpose should serve to support the mission and make the business more effective in achieving that mission.

2 – Clarity

Your website may have a purpose, but is it clear to your visitors why your website exists? It’s easy to get caught up in adding all kinds of new features and building fancy websites, but sometimes overload can produce a jumbled message to visitors that produces confusion.

One of the goals during development of a website should be to achieve clarity that will show visitors what they can get out of your website and why they should care. Clarity applies to all different types of websites. E-commerce sites need to clearly communicate to visitors what can be purchased and why it should be done through their particular website. Blogs need to communicate to new visitors what the blog is all about and what types of content they will receive if they subscribe. Service providers need clarity when they are communicating the details of their services to visitors.

Clarity is sometimes achieved through simplicity. Cutting out the noise and the clutter on a website can make the primary message more easily understood by visitors. One of the reasons for using a minimalistic design is to assist in the level of clarity.

3 – Usability

For any website to be successful, people need to be able to use it. Design and appearance will never replace the need for usability. The usability needs of a site will partially depend on the nature of the site. For example, a large e-commerce site needs to have an effective search function, logical categorization of products for browsing, a user-friendly shopping cart, etc. A blog or any type of website with lots of text will need to provide excellent readability, good navigation between articles, etc.

Any site that lacks usability will struggle to keep visitors on the site and to encourage repeat visits. Most of us internet users are impatient and if we find something that makes us work too hard, we’ll simply leave. For a more informative look at the topic of usability, see What Everybody Ought to Know About Usability and Web Design.

4 – Accessibility

Accessibility and usability often get lumped together because they somewhat overlap, but they are two distinct issues. An accessible website will not force visitors to use a certain browser, exclude handicapped users, etc. If users can’t access your website, it’s obviously not usable either.

Effective websites will be widely accessible. The difficulty with accessibility is the amount of factors that are outside of your control. However, it is possible to have an attractive, information, and helpful site that is still accessible. For more on accessibility, see 100 Killer Web Accessibility Resources.

5 – User-Focus

Because visitors ultimately determine the success of a website, they should be the focus during development. Often times, however, designers or website owners get distracted by their own wants and needs for the website, and the users are forgotten or put on the back burner.

A user-focused website will be both usable and accessible, but it will be much more than that. A website or blog that is focused on users will build content that interests and helps users, and the desires of visitors will always be important in any decision involving the development of the site. A poor website will do the opposite, it will focus on the needs of the owner and attempt to force visitors to fit in the same box.

6 – Navigation

Website navigation affects both usability and accessibility, but it is important enough to warrant its own spot on this list. When developing a new website or working on a redesign, navigation should be a primary concern. Unless you want visitors to view one page and then leave your site, you’ll need to make it as easy as possible for them to find what they are looking for.

Most websites and blogs today use fairly common navigational techniques that are expected by the average visitor. Typically, the site will have a primary navigation menu that will link to the most important pages on the site, and other links will be added to the body of the page wherever appropriate. Sitemaps, sitewide searches and FAQ pages are all very common and visitors will look for them when they don’t know where else to turn.

Blogs also have their own unique navigational trends that blog readers tend to appreciate, such as a list of categories, links to the most recent posts, links to the most popular posts, and links to related posts.

In addition to providing visitors with an easy way to move through the site, navigation is often used by designers to create more visually-appealing websites (see 45 Photoshop Tutorials for Better Navigation). Although navigation provides designers with a great opportunity to improve the look of the site, attractiveness should not come at the expense of usability and accessibility.

When developing the navigation for your website, think about what pages are most likely to be wanted by visitors, which pages are most critical for the purposes of your website, how visitors will want to move from one page to the next, what visitors will expect in terms of link location and pages linked, and how many clicks it will take visitors to get from your homepage to any other specific page.

7 – Appearance

Last but not least, the appearance of a website will be a determining factor in its success. Not every website needs to be an award-winning design in order to achieve it’s goals, but it should appeal to it’s specific audience and it should present a positive, professional image.

Trends in web design are constantly changing, and chances are if your site hasn’t been redesigned since 1999 it’s painfully obvious to your visitors. Most website owners prefer to freshen up their design or completely change it every couple of years to avoid this type of situation.

The design of the site should complement the content of the site, not overpower it. The design should also match stylistically with the message and the purpose of the site.

What’s Your Opinion?

What factors do you feel separate a good website from a bad website?

Other Posts of Interest:

For more information on building a successful website:

• 21 First Impression Factors
• What Makes Good Blog Design?
• Effectively Testing Your Website in Multiple Browsers

Looking to Hire a Designer or Developer?

Post a free job listing to the DesignM.ag job board for freelance, part-time or full-time positions. Your listing will be seen by thousands of talented designers and developers. - Post a job for free.