Posted by Paul Ding on 01/09/06 17:21

On 8 Jan 2006 07:56:37 -0800, MajorSetback@excite.com posted something
that included:

>I am starting up a home business and will be setting up a web site to
>market the software that I will be developing in C++. I was wondering
>if I should buy something like Dreamweaver or Frontpage or try to
>develop the web pages directly using HTML and a text editor.

No.

People are going to judge you software by the quality of your website.
You don't want a static website; you need something dynamic. A
bulletin board lets your users rave about your product, lets your
users suggest new uses for your product, and provide workarounds for
the, ahem, "features" we all work so hard to avoid. A blog lets your
users feel like they know you personally, and not only do many people
prefer to buy from a friend, even the ones that want to keep an arms'
length from their suppliers will be happy to believe that it's easy to
contact you for support. They worry about buying a product they can't
figure out how to use, with support in Mumbai, complete with such a
heavy accent they can't undestand.

Since you only have one product (or a half-dozen), you may well be
using PayPal and 2checkOut or something like that for processing
payments. (Some people love PayPal, some people hate it, and you will
benefit from offering potential customers both options.)

Consequently, you don't really need ZenCart or OSCommerce or some
other full-fledged shopping cart. That means you can use a regular CMS
instead. Drupal is pretty easy to deal with, and it's the one I would
go with.

Another solution might be to go with Mambo Open Source or Joomla.
These are basically the same product - there's recently been a rift in
the developer community, and it appears most of them are now working
on the new product, Joomla, instead of MOS. I've not spent much time
with Joomla, but there is a patch available that allows you can to use
single-sign-in Mambo Open Source with Simple Machines Forum for a BBS.
There are a lot of other CMSes, but they tend to be lot more
slashdottish in appearance, and I hink you probably want a website
that looks simple, clean, easy to use, because that will suggest to
customers that your C++ software will be simple and clean in
appearance, and easy to use.

Good luck in your venture!





--
If we're losing 40-130 species a day,
How come nobody can itemize them?
And why can't fruitflies be one of them?

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