Starting a New website from our successful instore print business

[TaraSue]

I am unsure if printplanet.com is the right place for the questions I have, if so I apologize and if you could direct me to someplace that may be able to help me I would be forever thankful.

I Co-own my family business that has been around since 1999. We are a one stop shop for picture framing, art gallery and printing needs from photo restoration, art reproductions, proofing to digital enhancements. We have a templated site through strongretailer.com which is limited and we will be reworking soon. But it drives traffic to us every day!

While our printing/photo restoration/photo enhancements/ art reproduction side of the business has grown tremendously since we began 5 years ago we wanted to branch this off into its own website to expand more. I have self taught myself slowly over the last 6 months building a wordpress site and it is coming together beautiful.. but the technical side, not so much.

Question #1 I have been searching for MIS technology that could incorporate into my wordpress site. Do you have any reccomendations?

Question #2 I do not have the knowledge to build a specialized shopping cart for printing. Do you have any reccomendations?

Question #3 What is the best for FTP? I was looking into Amazons services.

Question #4 I have come very far with the website and graphics and am determined. Do you think going through a printing host lets say like keenprint.com or something like that would just be easier and safer? Do you have any specialized website hosts for printing you could reccomend?

I would hate to throw away what I've already started months ago.. but I have not found anything reliable when it comes to a specialized shopping cart, ftp, and MIS that would all incorporate together to easily understand and easy to use for customers... Frankly, I've hardly had good leads on any of these.

Any answers, resources, guidance, replies or questions for me are much appreciated. Thanks so much,
Tara

 

[arossetti]

This might be a good place to start. Look at the Web-2-Print guide.

Guess the URL would help.... https://ultimateguide.infotrends.com/UltimateGuides/home.html

 

[TaraSue]

Thank-you for this site it gives me a lead.The information is extremely brief but I'll give them a call to learn more and see if this suites my needs. It's just that there is so much software out there. I want something that is going to give me exactly what I need, functional, yet affordable. This looks extremely affordable compared to what I was looking at with Home Page - Avanti Systems MAYBE SOME DAY. Thanks again.

 

[Alith7]

for some of the file uploader and shopping cart things, check out this guy:
Web Apps, Custom Web Programming, Web Design, Interactive Websites - Encodable Industries

Anthony is great, we have been using the Filechucker and Userbase plugins on our website for years! We are almost finished with customizing Cornerstore for online pricing and shopping, but it sounds like you are selling more along the lines of photo prints, not "commercial printing" so the basic Cornerstore system should work pretty well.

If you are going to continue to host your own, I would also recommend looking into Dreamhost.com and their VPS hosting. It is a really stable host, and the customer service has always been top notch. I highly suggest the VPS over the shared hosting, it generally comes in around $20/month but is adjustable based on your needs (up to 30 times a day...) and gives you a more stable platform for file uploading. they have unlimited storage, and I mean unlimited. we use the Filechucker system to give each of our customers their own private folder on the server with up to 15GB of storage per customer. Before we built our own site, we looked into all the "canned" Web-to-print systems, and every single one...EVERY ONE... pretty much hung up the phone on us when we told them the file management system we offer our customers now and that it was a requirement.

If you want to play with it a bit, you can see our old setup here:
Digital Edge Copy and Print Shops, Milwaukee Metro Area

and our new almost finished site here:
Graphic Edge Printing

I can't show you the shopping cart aspect yet because it's not finished yet, but should be int he next week or so. The one downfall is the MIS system... it's not perfected yet, and is pretty basic, but Anthony is great to work with and for very VERY reasonable rates, he will help you customize the cart to do what you want. the other great thing is that other than hosting rates, and occasional updates (which are soo cheap) there is no "monthly fee" to have this system.

If you have any questions, please feel free to drop me a private message.

 

[arossetti]

Thank-you for this site it gives me a lead.The information is extremely brief but I'll give them a call to learn more and see if this suites my needs. It's just that there is so much software out there. I want something that is going to give me exactly what I need, functional, yet affordable. This looks extremely affordable compared to what I was looking at with Home Page - Avanti Systems MAYBE SOME DAY. Thanks again.

I think you might of misinterpreted the link. Infotrends is like the consumer reports of the print industry. Their Ultimate Guide has information about 10-15 different w2p systems from multiple vendors.

 

[TaraSue]

Thank-you for this detailed information. I love what your new store front has going. Right now I am just very lost on what direction to go to. I've been looking into doing something more web-to-print hosted. Which yes, I know that term is misinterpreted alot. But a site like keenprint.com or pressero.com. I just don't think I have what it takes to build this on my own at this point. I've delved in and have worked months. But all these plugins that your talking about I definitely need and thank-you for the resources. But I just don't trust building something secure and functional on the technical side of it yet. More research more time! If I do decide to keep going in this direction I just may drop you a few questions. Thanks so much!

 

[Alith7]

Thank-you for this detailed information. I love what your new store front has going. Right now I am just very lost on what direction to go to. I've been looking into doing something more web-to-print hosted. Which yes, I know that term is misinterpreted alot. But a site like keenprint.com or pressero.com. I just don't think I have what it takes to build this on my own at this point. I've delved in and have worked months. But all these plugins that your talking about I definitely need and thank-you for the resources. But I just don't trust building something secure and functional on the technical side of it yet. More research more time! If I do decide to keep going in this direction I just may drop you a few questions. Thanks so much!

I know it can be VERY overwhelming. I do a fair amount of back end coding on my own, but Anthony at Encodable has been invaluable!

A couple things that might help, Dreamhost.com has 91 days of free trial for their hosting (I don't know why 91), if you want to try them out, I can give you a referral code that will get you a nice discount off your first year of hosting. All of their available services are offered with a trial period so you can see if it is a fit before you are committed.

for the Encodable plugins, all of the scripts are available as indefinite trials, they have limited functionality, but you can install them, play with them, test them, mess them up and start over , before you buy. Basic tech support and "how do I do..." type questions as well as all your upgrades for the first year are included with the purchase price.

good luck! Message me if you start to dabble and need help, I'll send you me personal email.