As most of you know, those who have been following my various blogs, or classroom antics, for years; I am not a big fan of doing web work. Part of this is due to my non-linear thinking. I am not great at writing code. I can read it 99% of the time, but writing it from scratch is beyond me. Part of this is also due to to the nature of working inside of a box. I hate working inside of a box — espcially a box where I spend a lot of time designing something that will look different on any given browser on any given day on any given machine.

However, I am pressed from time to time to throw my hat into the web building ring. And I answer the call with a fair amount of teeth gnashing. The result of all this angst is that I am fairly competent in Dreamweaver and CSSedit. I use Transmit to direct traffic and modify small bits of code as I go, and Illustrator and Phtoshop (and sometimes Fireworks) to tie the visuals together.

Over the past two years, as more and more of my clients make the move to eCommerce type solutions in various forms, I have seen quite a few shopping cart back ends cobbled to website front ends. As most of these ventures have been budget driven (my clients want to test not invest) I have been forced to dive into another Web building tool; Zen Cart.

Zen Cart is a community driven, public licence (open source) eCommerce solution. It is by far the most convoluted piece of software that I have ever used. But, I am getting past the steep learning curve and I have recently built a basic eCommerce site in three days. The trick in this software is knowing where NOT to look for making changes to something that should be straight forward. The good news is, I may actually make some money on this project, well, I will as long as I can keep project creep at bay. (Another web eccentricity that I hate.)

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