Webdesigna currently use a number of open source packages as a basis for new web site projects, the choice of which being dependent on the cutomers immediate and long term requirements. As part of our hosting packages one or more of these can be pre-installed with or without sample data giving you a working web site within minutes of your order.

Zen Cart

As the name may suggest this software provides a full featured e-commerce site. Having evaluated a wide range of such packages, both closed and open source, Zen Cart stands out above the others for a number of reasons. Webdesigna have a lot of experience working with and customising this package and we often help customers and web professionals alike to integrate their Zen Cart web site into payment and other gateways.

In terms of integrating/modifying your online shopping methods Zen Cart allows great flexibility with it's modular design allowing off the shelf or custom developed shipping rates, payment options, discount structures, coupon handling and so on. We have yet to find a customer who's working practices can't be met by Zen Cart regardless of the complexity or otherwise of your product ranges, payment methods or even your packing/shipping calculations. It can even split orders into boxes, taking into account additional packaging weights etc...

Zen Cart uses one of the best templating systems yet developed, allowing every aspect of your web site's look to be modified to suit your requirements without modifying the underlying code. This means that software updates can be installed at a later date without having to worry about all the code that was modified for your template. Once completed templates can also be easily moved onto other sites should the need arise.

One of the Webdesigna philosophies is that all our customer sites should be maintainable by the customer without trying to turn them into IT specialists first. Zen Cart offers a simple web interface where powerful administration tools allow the end user to modify and add new content/pages as well as maintain product lists, upload images, change shipping rates, tax rates etc... For this reason we regularly use Zen cart for sites that aren't yet offering online shopping as it's simple approach to "content management" gives our customers the freedom to generate their own web site content and publish it without any software other than a web browser.

Joomla

Joomla is a full featured CMS (Content Management System) that is ideal for collabarative projects such as community groups, clubs, organisations where multiple end users can be given the rights and web based tools to amend and create content, news articles and reports.

Like Zen Cart, the built in template system allows the user generated information to be instantly formatted into a finished web page,

Both Zen Cart and Joomla can be integrated with other packages to provide functions such as forum facilities, image galleries, Wiki pages and blogs.