X-Cart:Adding CMS/blog to your store
The current e-commerce industry involves not only selling goods, but also creating and maintaining communities around your store. This approach - when your web-site provides not only opportunity to your visitors to buy goods, but also includes the sections, where they can learn more about your company, communicate with other visitors, share their own ideas about the shop and so on - works much better than the traditional one - when your web-site is only store and nothing more - because it unites a group of people around the store.
When there is a community, it is easier for store's owner to meet the expectations of buyers, since the owner is aware of buyers' needs and wishes. On the other hand, buyers know that sharing their opinions makes sense - because they know that the owner will take it into consideration. Another thing is the bigger community the faster it expands, which means there will be more clients in the future, hence your sales will be increased.
What can you do in order to create a community around your store? The simplest way is to start a blog. It might sound funny, but indeed it might help you at the first steps.
You can write whatever you find interesting. It can be from occasional posts describing how your company looks inside including photos, to the regular reports of your results, milestones and future plans. The more people learn about you the more they trust you.
This brings us to idea to create a blog. Surely, you can create it on blogger.com or www.livejournal.com or whatever, but what for, if you can build it right near your web-shop? Your personal blog not far from your store is better since your customers do not leave your web-site to have a look at your recent updates and the design of your blog perfectly meets the design of your shop. Basically, it should be that your web-site is cosy place to people with the same interests to communicate. At the same they can buy products just in couple of clicks after others recommended doing so.
So, now we need to decide what software to choose to run a blog. Frankly speaking, at this moment we have three blog-script monsters:
All of them are free and amazing, but it is needed to understand pros and cons of them. The full comparison of all those CMS will not be given here, only few notes: Note: you can easily find the detailed comparison in the web, for instance: http://www.goodwebpractices.com/other/wordpress-vs-joomla-vs-drupal.html
| System | Advantages/disadvantages | Conclusion |
|---|---|---|
| Wordpress | + Wonderfully easy to install and start blogging right now, even for not IT person.
- Its architecture keeps developers from its customizing. It is possible, but still quite hard. |
Extremely user-friendly, but quite developer-unfriendly. Great for personal blogs, but for large and medium projects it's better to find a replacement. |
| Drupal | + Huge great community, tons of modules already done, architecture allows to customize Drupal as much as you need, very powerful application.
- Complex for end-user. Requires certain programming knowledge from developer. |
Awesome for big and medium projects especially if you are going to continuously update or extend them. |
| Joomla! | + Great community as well, huge amount of themes, requires average developer's skills, quite flexible for extension.
- Still quite complex for end-user, but easier than Drupal. Even it is flexible, it does not provide Drupal's flexibility. |
Fascinating for medium projects which are not going to be hugely extended. |
