question Developing domain sales website

[Name Trader]

I'm in contact with a developer about designing my domain sales website. He is saying that he is proposing Drupal or WordPress. I'm kinda balking at both, because my experiences with CMS's, although not comprehensive, have not been all that good (with me being the developer). What does anyone think here about using Drupal or WordPress to develop a domain sales website? Will the CMS overhead crush the workings of the website? What are the pros and cons of each option?

He has also suggested using code-igniter when I said wouldn't a PHP5/CSS3/MySQL solution be better. However the cost would be about twice as much.

It's my intention to develop a quality website. So what other options are available to me with regards to the development platform, which might also be a better solution?

 

[Name Trader]

@carob - That was a good thread started about 9 months ago, and I'm still trying to find a developer for my website Mind you I have been busy with my domaining (mostly) as well as my personal life. I haven't seen any WordPress (or any other CMS for that matter) with any credible Domains For Sale website. If you know of any at all, I'd appreciate you pointing them out to me. This, and the fact that all professional Domains For Sale websites I know are written in PHP/CSS/MySQL, plus the fact I'm wary of the CMS overhead and personally have a true fear/misunderstanding of how WP and other CMS's work, that I "feel" like a PHP/CSS/MySQL solution, is going to be a better solution. However I may be wrong. I also understand this may be forgoing a heck of a load of overhead, which I may or may not require.

 

[Electric-Shadow]

WordPress is what I use on my site, given you can easily customize it to a much greater extent than Drupal.

There's also plenty of options when it comes to listing and selling your names via wp which you can customize to suit your purpose. Most are free or negligible in cost.

 

[DNVantage]

@stub

I have developement/qa background (not so much now due to lack of time ) plus I also outsource some of my projects, so my 2 cents.....

* Go with a known, established CMS because more popular the software is, more easy it is to find a dev to write a theme/plugin for cheap and later, more easy for another developer to step in to fix bugs or add features. Custom solutions from scratch need more investment to write and even more to fix bugs or add features. Consider what will happen a year or two down the line.

* If you don't mind a semi-custom solution and if you are not in hurry, consider waiting for Drupal 8, which is a major upgrade. It offers a ready to use platform for semi-custom solutions. Drupal release progress is slow, so expect around 6 months or more before Drupal 8 is released. Wordpress is a good option but Drupal 8 is lot more flexible. This will mean less development cost compared to full custom project, as Drupal 8 has required infrastructure in place for small website apps. I am holding off some of my projects for Drupal 8 to save on cost.

* Not recommending full fledged custom solution over wordpress or drupal for a small project like DN sales website but if you want to go with a custom solution, consider node.js (nodejs frameworks) or python (django) for backend and Bootstrap3 one of most popular css framework for UI front end, plus one of new but established front end MV* frameworks like React (from Facebook) or Angular.js (from Google), there are quite a few good MV* frameworks so you want to go with what your dev is comfortable. codeigniter.com is one of lighter server side php framework, there are tons, if you go with php, you want one of php frameworks. No matter which development language you choose, you will want a framework. PHP is more well known as it has been around longer but node.js and python have been around long enough and are now the new established languages and IMO, offer more savings down the line.

If you are going with wordpress/drupal, an existing theme/plugin will be lot cheaper, plus less headache in long term. Once you know what works or does not with a ready made solution, you can ask a dev to build something similar. Dev's like having a working idea to base their solution on.

Hope that helps. Feel free to ask me any question you have on this, here or PM.

 

[carob]

The guts of this is still what info you want to store and display and how to manage it. What fields do you want to store and display and how do you want to let users search/find on the site? By price, category, keyword, tag, age, extension, pattern, length? What info do you want to harvest from/about visitors?

Do they just contact you to make an enquiry or do they click to buy, and if so, how/where do they buy?

How will you enter/update/manage this stuff? One by one? Upload spreadsheet? Control panel on website?

 

[Name Trader]

@carob - I have answers to all those questions. Where do I go from there?