drphill

Hello People,

Firstly I have reading these board for a number of weeks, so hello to you all. Im have a fairly strong business background and would say I'm itermediate to advanced in the ways of IT.

Onto the question:

What software can you recommend that I can build a site offline, not requiring a host etc, whereby I can take my time to develop a site, then finally find a host, domain and upload. It would require a cart.

Are there add-on packages available for frontpage or dreamweaver etc?

Thanks in Advance

howdy88

Firstly, Welcome to the forums! ..

Considering how cost effective an online solution would be over the inconvenience and unreliability of an offline solution, is it really worth it?

I presume you are wanting to do down this route so that you can save on the cost of the server and fine tune until you are ready to go? A lot of things are different when you upload them online, not everything works in practice (as you probably know). Maybe it's a personal preference but I see no disadvantage to establishing your online store and working at it bit by bit, as well as being able to test its functionality and fine tune it under dynamic and real time scenarios.

Thoughts?

Krosset.G

Have to agree with Anthony here - also a good idea to mail your site users (ie customers) and get their feedback whilst its in its infancy

frogler

Virtually all carts are php / MySQL based, neither of which are PC friendly.

Anthony hit the nail on the head. A cart with thousands of items will take less than 100 MB of server space. You can find hosting for that or more easily for under $ 5 a month. If nothing else, you'll get to see how things look in real time.
.

squirtell

Heck, use a free host. It's really not worth turning your PC into a web server.

Gosford0

You could develop your shop offline using Apache, MySQL etc, for example with OS Commerce or XT Commerce. But if you are not that firm with setting up these things I wouldn?t bother with it.

I agree with Pete and Anthony, get yourself a webhoster (pete would come to mind here) and get your own webspace. Then either invest some money to have the appropriate software for the shop installed (again, I would recommend either OS Commerce or XT Commerce due to the fact that they are highly customizable) and maybe get a custom template for the shop, or try to install it yourself. You can always delete it if anything goes wrong.

Personally, I would find someone do it for me, even if it costs money, because the time I would have to invest in this would cost too much in relation to missed profits. After all, why should I do something that takes me 10 or 20 hours if there is someone who can do it in 1 or 2 hours.

drphill

Many thanks to you all for your speedy replies. This forum certainly seems a fountain of knowledge.

Adam may I ask, the websites you designed on you own page were they created using this apache system you recommended?

hoogan

To be honest the reason I am enquiring is I have a number of personal and business contacts that know I tinker with computers and always ask me if I can do them a webshop.

I no experience with SQL, PHP etc. Im an engineer by trade and somehow now work in finance, I would rather spend the time myself than pay somebody else. I pick things up pretty quickly.

I want to setup a first website for a friend then use this as a base to do a number of other projects.

From my research in this short time I would say I am swaying toward using OS Commerce.

endor2

apache is just the software which is installed on my laptop which works a an offline web server.

I do use this to create my sites.. it works alot better for me as i can view changes and edit files in real time without having to upload them to a server repeatedly.