Volusion

So I'm starting to feel a little better as I've been showing the back end of Volusion to a few of my programming friends and the consensus is: Volusion sucks. (In other words, not entirely my fault).

I've been trying to customize the pre-established frame that they have and now realize that parts of it aren't even customizable...PLUS their own code doesn't even validate!

Volusion has terrible cross-browser compatibility and the back end is a total mess. I found this blog post which pretty much sums it up: http://www.urbanpit.com/2008/03/volusion-sucks.html

I tried to use their live chat to get some help the other day, and ended up waiting about 45 minutes before giving up. Needless to say, once this assignment is over I'm going to find a new ecommerce solution. It's too late for me to start over right now so I'm going to keep plugging away, but the end result will not be anywhere close to what it's supposed to look like.

Programming...

So I'm definitely not a programmer. I am having a lot of issues with the programming. I've had a few of my programming friends look at the CMS I'm using and apparently it's crap - which is just great because I'm paying for it.
APPARENTLY it would have been a lot simpler if I had gone in and sliced it all from scratch instead of trying to what Volusion provided me with.
At this rate, I'm not going to have a completely finished working site when the course is done. It will look alright, and the shopping cart will work, but if I want to use this I'm going to have to put in a lot more hours.
Hoping this will not affect my grade too much, but the website will definitely be unfinished...

Programming

I started programming last night! Wow it has been a while. I read some tutorials to refresh myself...the first hour was very frustrating. It's starting to come back to me; I don't think it will take quite as long as I thought it would (knock on wood).
I also installed a CSS plugin for firefox which is very helpful. Unfortunately it's only available for older versions of firefox so I had to downgrade.
The link for the plugin is here.

Fingers crossed!

I showed the class my psd file last class which included all of the inside pages. There was some good feedback and just some minor tweaks. I made those tweaks and sent to Doug a few minutes ago. Once I receive approval I will start on the programming which I am actually very nervous about. I have a feeling I'm being too ambitious and won't be able to have the entire site finished by the time it's due.
Fingers crossed!

Reading Break...what??!

So I didn't really get a break this past week...working 40 hours while going to school will do that to you. But that's ok. I made some revisions to my home page and got it ok'd by Doug. I now have all the inside pages designed, including rollovers and subnav. I will be showing it to the class tomorrow and I'm sure I'll want to make some more changes after that. Once the design is totally signed off on I'll start programming. In the meantime, I'm familiarizing myself with Volusion's CMS and trying to brush up on my dusty programming skills.