Just how customizable is the script?

[mjonesgt]

Background:

We're developing an "Adult" advertising platform. Advertisers will pay to post or purchase advertising space throughout the site. It will be "classifieds," but we call it advertising...you know, for thouse who would like to advertise their services/products.

We were working with a developer who strung us along for over two months and basically couldn't get job done at all. We're now in the process of being refunded, but we've lost out on a lot of time, money and ENERGY through the process. When I found 68 classifieds it seemed like a God-send.

The original developer was supposed to make the site custom, from the ground-up...like I said, he couldn't do it. So now, we're trying to just get a site going. We want something taht works and can accept payments and we're putting our initial 'bells-and-whistles' on the backburner until we can profit and have those things done exactly as we want.

We're planning on purchasing the developer version, though I'm not sure if we need that level of access yet.

In the template, we need to be able to change all of the colors to our site colors, change the tabs,import our logos and graphics, set it up so that people can post listings that aren't really geared towards "selling" as much as listing an informative ad, have all of our normal site pages imported in, etc...

There are some features we originally wanted that I can see now would be more like the "modules" 68 uses. So we'll revisit most of those later.

In my mind, the best part about this software is that all that programming language is done. To me you would just have to change the appearence, links, the way the admin/user accounts are set-up etc.

...someone tell me if I'm off-base here...

My partner and I have limited programming knowledge, but we know what looks good and how we want our site to function.

With just making the adjustments I've listed...basically making the site look good enough to "pass" as I think some of our custom things may take a developer a while, how long do you think it would take a developer to make these changes to the template? Will we need to purchase the Developer version now or can we make most "visual" adjustments with the designer version?

I really wish I could just save money and do it myself for this basic version of the site, but I'd probably pull my hair out trying to learn as I go about things I'm not familiar with.

Also, we have someone who has been helping us look over everything on the site & decide if it's right for us. We plan to utilize his services for the real customization. For now though, would it make more sense to get one of the people who regularly posts here (those that are already familiar with the software) to do the customizing for us? I'm just leery because we've wasted so much time and money and I don't want a developer who isn't familiar with this script to get into it, hit a brink wall, and then say it will take longer & cost us more...

I'm sorry this is so long and rambling, but any help on these issues (even if you only have advice/info for part of it) would be greatly appreciated.

Thanks in advance!

[mjonesgt]

I forgot to mention:

Regarding cities: Is the site loaded with a way to list cities?

Right now our site is flash opening>map>cities>city specific classifieds.

What I was thinking is to have the city page just be a static page with the cities listed to link to that specific city's classified area. We'll use subdomains for the cities individual classifieds. i.e. www.somesite.com/Atlanta.

Is there something already loaded into the script to navigate between the different cities from the classified pages? Or should we just list the cities on the classified pages and have the user click the link to go there?

That may be redundant...didn't sleep enough

[Eric Barnes]

For your first question the design can be changed really anyway you wish. It is really very flexible and to show some of the sites that have been done I recommend checking out our Site Showcase | 68 Classifieds Blog & News

Also this one seems to have a whole lot of customizations: Every Ounce Counts

As for designer vs developer you can always update later and all the design can be changed in the designer. But the Developer will give you a lot greater flexibility later on.

I have never really liked the city idea but that is just me. I know templatecodes have a regions module that may work for you: TemplateCodes | 68 Classifieds Location Filter

Of course you could also do an install for each region or even use the categories for this. Although it might be time consuming doing it that way. Also there are other options but would require some level of customization.

As for hiring a developer I recommend checking our resource site:
ClassifiedMods Professionals

Each developer has ratings and you can see if others have liked their service.

I hope this answers your questions. If I missed any let me know.

[mjonesgt]

Thanks for the response.

I think most of what you said is what I already had gathered, but I needed to ask to pass along to my partner and the developer.

Questions better explained:

1) So do you think we should get the designer version & just upgrade when we get into the super-customizations? It's still kind-of unclear to me what level of editing the basic template is available in the designer vs. developer versions. I think we're pretty decided on going ahead and getting the Developer version, but it doesn't hurt to have both sides of the coin presented.

2) Do you think it would be beneficial to use one of the guys around here as opposed to someone unfamiliar with the software in the interest of time and budget? The guy we're using says he can do these changes to the template so that we can have our basic site up within a week and that he's quoting us a price of $800-$1000 (not including 68 classifieds). This price seems steep to me considering what I view as the "hard" work (scripting and other background things the end user doesn't see) is already done and won�t require much manipulation at this point in our project. I have not even a general idea of how much the developers around here charge for customization, but people advertise completing custom websites for not a lot more than he's quoting us...

(But what do I know?)

urgh...input?

[mjonesgt]

Oh and sorry about the city thing Eric

With what we're planning to do you HAVE to do something with the cities being obviously separated. I think the best thing to do will just be the subdomains for the individual city classifieds and links to the other cities on each city's pages...only way to not make it complicated...I think...

[Eric Barnes]

1) So do you think we should get the designer version & just upgrade when we get into the super-customizations? It's still kind-of unclear to me what level of editing the basic template is available in the designer vs. developer versions. I think we're pretty decided on going ahead and getting the Developer version, but it doesn't hurt to have both sides of the coin presented.

Yes you can do this. I will point out in case you haven't seen it that the price to upgrade later is $125 compared to the $100 difference from the start.

2) Do you think it would be beneficial to use one of the guys around here as opposed to someone unfamiliar with the software in the interest of time and budget? The guy we're using says he can do these changes to the template so that we can have our basic site up within a week and that he's quoting us a price of $800-$1000 (not including 68 classifieds). This price seems steep to me considering what I view as the "hard" work (scripting and other background things the end user doesn't see) is already done and won�t require much manipulation at this point in our project. I have not even a general idea of how much the developers around here charge for customization, but people advertise completing custom websites for not a lot more than he's quoting us...

The design quote seems reasonable to me. You view the coding as the hard work where coders view the design as the hard work. The classic right brain left brain.

I would recommend going with one of the developers that is familiar with the script just because they should be able to do any customizations quicker which would relate to less money. For getting estimates you may want to contact them directly I am sure each charges and quotes differently.

[seymourjames]

Just to add our 2 penneth - whatever you do avoid making categories your geographies if have lots of them. It really bloats a system making it difficult to administer. Locations are locations and categories are categories. There have been several posts here on the forum about that. You can imagine a 1000 locations with just 50 subcategories for each location. That is 50,000 categories. Kind of unimaginable to administer easily. The nature of the problem is to either divide it into subdomains for specific regions and/or filter locations.

As for design then the reality is this. It takes a huge amount of effort to make a fully customisable template which is compatible across different browsers. It is also expensive and difficult to maintain. It is rarely a one off project and then it is all done forever. The way forward in general if you have a modest budget is to start with a template which maintains a forward upgrade path and then modify that with changes that will carry forward across browsers. A couple of our customers have gone forward and made customizations in your market area. I will be glad to share some of those sites with you but not in a public forum of course. The quote you have is reasonable but so difficult to judge when you say you wish to change this or that.

Here is a truism. If you design something in blue with circles, half of your customers will like it and half of them will not. The others will definitely prefer red with squares. It actually matters even less what you as the owner/administrator think. At some point you are very much on diminishing returns in terms of design. The truth is that your success is 90% marketing plan and 10% everything else.

[mjonesgt]

Thanks for your responses Eric & Seymour!

Originally Posted by Eric Barnes

Yes you can do this. I will point out in case you haven't seen it that the price to upgrade later is $125 compared to the $100 difference from the start.

I think we'll just go ahead and get the Developer version, I'm not sure, but my partner may have already purchased it today. We'll be getting into deeper customization not long after we have the initial "basic" site in place, so there's really no point I can see in putting off purchasing the Developer version.

[quote=Eric Barnes;43374]The design quote seems reasonable to me. You view the coding as the hard work where coders view the design as the hard work. The classic right brain left brain.[ /QUOTE]

Ah, yes. Well luckily I'm one of those people who can go right brain and left brain. I see the coding part as more difficult just because I haven't gone as far into as "experts" have and I've never even tried writing code that is out of the norm or unique...so of course, that seems like the difficult part to me. The design aspect I could do in my sleep ...just not sure I can relay my design into the templates with the amount of coding knowledge at this point. I get that though. And being a female makes it even worse on the side of not understanding why design wouldn't just be a given to everyone lol.

Originally Posted by Eric Barnes

I would recommend going with one of the developers that is familiar with the script just because they should be able to do any customizations quicker which would relate to less money. For getting estimates you may want to contact them directly I am sure each charges and quotes differently.

This is what I was thinking and that's why I asked. There's also the side that the Developer we're talking to has been advising us in what to do over the past couple of weeks and we've arranged the payment aspect with him in a way that will be easy for us. Plus we have been planning on using his services for the full-on customization, so maybe it would be better for him to work with the script, our colors, fonts, graphics, etc from the beginning rather than having work done by many sources.

I don't really know what the right answer is on this one as each side has pros and cons, so we'll just have to make a decision.

As far as contacting the guys who are familiar with 68 already, is there an easy place to find their e-mail addresses? lol...I can't seem to find them. Mike-N-Tosh, DMT Media, Seymour, and Larry all have a contact form, but I'd rather be able to send a regular e-mail with attachments and details than use the contact forms where I have no idea how the format will turn up in their inbox.

I know you guys are around here; if you see this feel free to PM me if it's okay to e-mail you guys info about our site.

Originally Posted by seymourjames

Just to add our 2 penneth - whatever you do avoid making categories your geographies if have lots of them. It really bloats a system making it difficult to administer. Locations are locations and categories are categories. There have been several posts here on the forum about that. You can imagine a 1000 locations with just 50 subcategories for each location. That is 50,000 categories. Kind of unimaginable to administer easily. The nature of the problem is to either divide it into subdomains for specific regions and/or filter locations.

Right now our site is supposed to service 55 cities in the United States, Canada, & Western Europe. Each city will support just 5-6 classified categories. Eventually this number will double as we'll be adding a "premier" advertising option where the user can choose templates, specialty fonts, additional photos for their ad etc (I hope that will be possible to integrate into 68). I don't know that I understand what you're saying, but making our categories the geographical locations NEVER entered my head. That just doesn't make sense to me. I know what you mean about it bloating the system...we're trying for as simplistic an approach as possible while still making the site what we "want" it to be. As I said before, I'm pretty sure what we'll do is have a static city page where users can select the city they're interested in and the link will lead to a sub domain of the site which is the classified listing pages for the city selected. Then for every page, probably down the left bar, we plan to also list each city so that users/surfers can get to any city from any other city's classifieds...I hope that makes sense.

Originally Posted by seymourjames

As for design then the reality is this. It takes a huge amount of effort to make a fully customizable template which is compatible across different browsers. It is also expensive and difficult to maintain. It is rarely a one off project and then it is all done forever. The way forward in general if you have a modest budget is to start with a template which maintains a forward upgrade path and then modify that with changes that will carry forward across browsers. A couple of our customers have gone forward and made customizations in your market area. I will be glad to share some of those sites with you but not in a public forum of course. The quote you have is reasonable but so difficult to judge when you say you wish to change this or that.

I understand it being difficult to judge when what I mention is pretty vague without some more specific illustrations ...For anyone who'd like to quote me, I'll be glad to send a link to the site as it looks now for a general idea and more info on how we'd like the basic customization of 68 to go. I'd LOVE it if you shared any links your clients don't mind you handing out. Feel free to PM me ...I have seen the level of customization that's possible through some of the links provided on this site, but many of them are more what you think of as a "classified" site than what we're planning to do...selling physical objects and all.

Originally Posted by seymourjames

Here is a truism. If you design something in blue with circles, half of your customers will like it and half of them will not. The others will definitely preferred with squares. It actually matters even less what you as the owner/administrator think. At some point you are very much on diminishing returns in terms of design. The truth is that your success is 90% marketing plan and 10% everything else.

We definitely understand that. We are trying to bring a product to our target advertisers that is not fully represented in the market today. Partially, yes, but not fully. We want our site to be visually appealing to advertisers/users/surfers, but remain easy to navigate, post, and find information.

The site should function similar to posting on http://www.craigslist.org/about/sites, http://cityvibe.com/, or http://www.backpage.com/classifieds/index, but the end look/feel should be more like http://www.eros.com/ (but hopefully easier to navigate/post/find information). We'll also be adding two other sites that will work with our site. I'm not sure yet though if we'll be able to use 68 classifieds with those sites. We would like for the 3 sites to all work together so that a user who registers with one could register with all three, but as I've seen mentioned in one of the threads on this forum, that may be difficult.

Again, thanks for yall's help thus far. This forum is truly an invaluable resource already.

[shanedawg]

You really can't go wrong with choosing 68 Classifieds. It is a great product with excellent support. It is highly customizable.

For you, I would recommend getting the developer version. I would also recommend getting a template from TemplateCodes.com, see Seymour's post above for the link. TemplateCodes has an awesome support team.

For example, I caused my site to go down one time (totally my fault). I emailed TemplateCodes support and within minutes I had two guys working on my site and they had it up and operational in no time. For another example I have had to request help from them several times and each time I had an answer within minutes! I can't tell you how much it means to me to have that level of support. It doesn't matter what time I submit a ticket or just send them an email, I have a response from them within minutes. These guys are the definition of excellent customer support.

The 68 Classifieds script and the TemplateCodes templates are easily configurable so site customization is a breeze. I came into this with very little knowledge and have successfully operated my site since this past February and have learned quite a bit between the individual help I've received from Eric and David as well as all I've learned on the forums.

Bottom line is, you can't go wrong with 68 Classifieds and/or templates from TemplateCodes.