I'm looking for some feedback on the design side of BV Commerce. Currently design is based around Master pages and CSS. One of our goals up to this point has been to offer as much flexibility as possible. This means we want designers to do almost anything they wish with layouts, etc. However, it comes at the price of complexity since we have multiple master pages, styles sheets, button sets, etc.

What I'd like to find out is would you rather see a single layout/set of controls that can be skinned or a loose set of controls that can be combined to create lots of layouts at the price of more work to create themes.

Marcus, you need to decide who your target market is:

Mere mortal merchants with limited programing skills/limited time to ramp up and learn/customise (like me), or,
Third party programers who will understand my needs and make use of your flexibilty and complexity and make a custom finished product.

The ability to bend the product to suit comes at a price.... scope creep has/is keeping some great ideas from working together. I KNOW of a few merchants who have been watching for the past 18 months and cannot jump in for lack of time and skills, yet there aren't enough third parties out there capable of delivering in a reasonably short time period and realistic budget.

We've all been to 'turn-key' shopping sites based on cookie-cutter designs. Some look good, some are pretty bad, but they work and fill the need. I'm not here because I needed it to be 'cookie-cutter' easy. ('be nice if everything worked ootb, though) I'm in the minority I'm afraid. There is likely a larger market for easy, drop in a picture and price and you're done, sites.

I think the current format is fine it just needs many more examples to expand upon.

BV also needs to begin developing add on modules that serve to both advance the software for future versions and solve immediate needs. Alternately find a way to make it worthwhile for addons to be developed.

It really depends on whom you ask. From a developer perspective it really doesnt make a difference. May be it does to a designer. But again, an experienced designer wouldnt bother because he would have already got used to what we have now.

Instead of changing directions for future versions, if you feel you can achieve everything you wanted in the current layout, I would prefer the existing layout because I have already gotten used to it. But if the current layout poses a limitation for future expansion, go ahead and change it.

At the end of the day, we go by what you provide. But would definitely appreciate if you dont change directions too often. My 2 cents.

Thanks,
Satya

I think the way that theming is set up right now is relatively close to ideal, because you're working with web standards and framework-specific functional code that isn't too proprietary otherwise. The way it works now is actually pretty clever and powerful, it's just tainted by the poor markup in the rest of the application. If the markup and structure were improved in the future, I think it'd be hard to beat.

I wouldn't recommend changing it too much from the way it works now, or integrating the Signature theming language into the stand-alone product, in the future. And definitely don't go in the direction of much more supremely bloated applications previously mentioned.

Any serious store needs to be accessible to a designer/developer. I don't think it's a question of deciding on the target market, which should always be merchants for ecommerce software. And merchants generally need designers/developers, that's why the industries exist.

Basically, anyone who knows web graphics, web standards (XHTML, CSS, JS, etc.) and can get familiar with some .Net stuff or drag and drop in Visual Web Developer can build a BVC5 theme after getting familiar with the relationships of things in the BVModules folders. It may not be ideal, but it's much closer than any other .Net ecommerce or content application has come to doing it right. Able, SF, DNN and the rest generally suck in comparison.

I will admit when I first got my new BV5 installed and looked at the selection of themes, I panicked. None of them looked anything like the one I had before and I had no clue how to create anything that looked passable. I was in shock for about a month and can empathize with the new guys that show up on this forum for the first time.

I loved BV4 and was looking forward to BV5. I bought it the day it became available. I did poke around in the files and noticed the modular structure. That showed me it would be much easier and hence cheaper to modify or tweak when needed.

As soon as I got access to Cliff's TeckGear Redux theme and his theme generator, everything became easy and straight forward. We ended up with a better looking site then we had before. I still don't know any dotnet but I did get some experience poking around in the css.

I guess what I'm trying to say is: If your looking for something where it is easy to change the themes for us Noob nondevelopers, you already have it with BV5. The only thing that was missing on the first release, was a varied selection of themes and simple instructions on how to change them. And now the instructions are easy:
1. Pick a theme you like.
2. Go into the Images Folder in the Themes folder and start swapping out images (with others of the same size) until you have something you like.
3. Go into the css and start changing colors until you got the look you want. (comments with directions would be nice)
4. Don't touch anything else unless you know what you are doing. Or find somebody that does.

You would of course need Cliff's theme generator but.... its still easy.

For $500 and a few hours set up time, you now have a site that looks good, is functional and has the programming behind it to handle things like "PCI Compliance?" Plus on top of that you have built in flexibility so the designers and developers can go nuts and create some of the most awesome web sites on the Internet.

I wouldn't worry to much about what the competition is doing (keep and eye on them though). Different is good if the product you have is better and cheaper. I would recommend focusing on making your product run faster and more efficiently, keeping up with the new technology and creating ways to deal with new problems arising in the industry.

Bob Noble

From a "cart" look. BV needs the flexibility it has to stay ahead.

It takes talent to build a good design, merchants need to understand they are merchants and no different than building a new brick and mortar store, you hire someone to get it done right.

For the price centric, there is a lot more to your design than a couple hours tweeking the CSS. I made a post a while ago about this here,
http://forums.bvcommerce.com/de...lt.aspx?f=17&m=23112

For a cost look on BV's side. Creating a robust GUI based design tool (which would still not do everything) would take a whole lot longer than creating a dozen well documented themes.

I would focus on polishing the underlying structure of design to aid the designers and more themes and documentation for the novice designers.

OK, thought I'd throw in my 2 cents.

I agree with Cliff & Noah...stick with standards based, non proprietary stuff and don't waste resources on wizards / GUIs for themes etc. "Seriously Flawed" tried that and the result was a waste of time for all those silly enough to have believed the marketing spin (like me). The "volume" end of the cart suppliers , Amazon etc own this "template" space.

Having said that, you don't want to raise the bar so high that a reasonably competent person can't get up & running without having to learn to cut code etc.

Noah said "I would focus on polishing the underlying structure of design to aid the designers and more themes and documentation for the novice designers."...I think this is exactly the smart way to go for BV.

It delivers the following benefits.

<UL>
<LI>A quick "head start" with documented themes allowing simple "light" customisation for novices or those with limited time or resources.
* Future proofing to allow for "heavy" customisation by spending more time &amp;/or hiring a specialist (standards count here as well).
</UL>
Cheers

John