Having a website designed is a fairly straight forward and easy process. There are many great developers in Jacksonville. The process is simple, you sit down with them and get a proposal; pick the best, and they build your website. As long as your business needs a standard business style website, the process is simple and has few traps or pitfalls.
When your website needs to do something more complex, the process of creating an e-commerce website can become unwieldy, and it is often difficult to find the correct developer for the type of project you are trying to develop.
The problem is that web developers often don’t see the complexities in programming projects as much of a hurdle. Mostly, those complexities are an afterthought. This approach leads to a problem where the client and the designer feel that 90% of the website is complete, but the designer can’t complete that last 10%.
The real problem is that a programmer can look at the project and can easily see that 20-30% of the project is complete and 70-80% needs to be completed, not the 10% that the designer and client think is left. The designer working on the project didn’t fully understand the difficulty of the remaining parts of the project and the budget was spent working on the first 20%, leaving nothing for the remaining 80%. The project stalls and eventually the client realizes that the site will never be successfully completed.
Problems like that do not happen when the client hires a developer who works on those types of projects and has a proven history of completing them. The client must ask before money changes hands if the programmer has done this type of work before and ask to see examples of programming of equal complexity to the proposed project. Ask the programmer to discuss the project, the issues they think the project will encounter and then give examples of completed projects. If completed projects are no longer online, then ask for references for past customers who purchased these types of sites.
Remember, a developer can work with a custom programmer as well. Often a specific web design company or marketing firm who is very good at what they do, does not always have a programmer capable of highly complex projects. An outside programmer can work with the design created by the design company, giving the client the best possible outcome.
There is a multitude of solutions for e-commerce: WooCommerce, Shopify, Big Commerce, Magento, Open Cart, Volusion, Square Space, Zen Cart and of course custom programming… You have to start with the end in mind. It is very hard to change e-commerce solutions once you realize you have chosen the wrong platform. So, all of the scenarios need to be addressed before programming it.