mrsite

[football programmes]

Does anybody use mrsite to run an e-commerce website? Pros? Cons?

[Babybots]

Hi,

I haven't personally but know people who have and from speaking to them.

Pros: Fairly good support forums apparently
Cons: Expensive, limited to number of products and images, charge you £15 to move away when you work out they are not that good.

I am sure others will be along with other experiences of them

Steve

[Supermum]

I use Mr.Site and it is running well. Never had a problem.
People always put Mr.Site down but it is cheap, does what it sets out to do, is easy to build and maintain yourself, can incorporate Paypal, has a variety of templates.
I'm afraid when you are presented with a quote for £2,000 then a £35 package is more than appealing.
I'm sure you'll get loads more negative replies but it suits me fine :)

[jenjenjo123]

Hi

My last website cost me a fortune (nearly £5K) and had 5 years worth of work in it. I set up a Mrsite £20 one and my customers have been stunned at how professional it looks, many assumed I'd got the old site back up and running again :D

Yes it's fairly basic but it works well enough for me for the time being. I would say give a £20 one a go ... even if you hate it you haven't lost a great deal.

When I designed mine I went for the less is more approach. Even the basic package comes with lots of frilly bits which I would recommend avoiding as they can look a tad gimmicky and unprofessional. I haven't used any of them and I stuck to the basic powdered white template, just changing the background colour to our brand colour.

As has already been said the package is really easy to use and the forum is excellent.

When designing your site do a google search for your competitors to get an idea of the designs that work well for your product/customer. Bear this in mind when chooosing a MrSite template.

You can also hide the designed at MrSite footer ;)

Jen x

[jenjenjo123]

Hi again ... Just clicked on your homepage ... Did you set all that up today :eek: ... Tis looking good anyway ;)

Jen

[football programmes]

thanks for the feedback so far people ... just playing around with it ready for a full launch at the start of next season.

already had a sale on the site (and no, not a test sale from me!)

keep the thoughts coming ...

[cmcp]

can you move your mr site website to another provider if you cancel the service?

what happens if your site becomes successful, you've gained good rankings in the search engines... are you then tied to mr site? do you own that source code and can you move it to another provider?

i'd recommend using wordpress on your own webspace. spend some time on someone freelance to guide you in setting it up, then it's yours and it's portable.

[tony84]

If your new to web design then it might be a good starting point.
However getting a website online neednt be expensive. £5k and £2k as people have said its a hell of a lot.

I have my site online, it costs me £6 a year for a domain name, £70 a year for hosting, i installed prestashop (http://www.prestashop.com) for free and spent £200 on a custom design and an add on i couldnt find anywhere else. But i could have got my site up and running without the £200 outlay. But i have a few years expeirence in getting non ecommerce sites online.
Personal choice i suppose and whether you want an open source/free product to base your business off or a custom made one. Both have pros and cons i suppose.

[NextPoint]

If your new to web design then it might be a good starting point.
However getting a website online neednt be expensive. £5k and £2k as people have said its a hell of a lot.

...

Don't forget to value your time too. You can buy your hosting and install some type of open source code to do the job and design your website yourself, but how much time does that cost you? There is a big misconception that a free website is actually free. If your time is worth £30 per hour and you spend 40 hours setting up your website with all your design, etc., you have invested £1,200 of time into you website.

Also take into account that if you hire someone who knows what they are doing, they will be able to do the job much better than you if you are not an expert web developer. This means that when you want to add new features in the future, a good developer will make your code easy to upgrade. This is a disadvantage of many open source projects - code is often messy and if you can't find a plugin to do what you want, it's more difficult to create the code yourself.

[Homshaw]

I have clients where the web designer charged a fortune to write the site then charges another small fortune every time they want to make a small change. There is a lot to be said for being in control

Mr Site is easy to use. If you have a problem you drop them an email and they respond very quickly. I wrote two websites on Mr Site and they were fine. There is a site called Mymrsite with lots of examples

The forum is helpful

The professional version gives you the option to remove the Mr Site logo

It is quite a bit cheaper to buy off Amazon

I would try it for 20 pounds or 60 pounds for the professional version if it works it's a real bonus. The professional version gives you 100 pages and a helpful SEO tool box

I quite enjoyed doing it in on an evening. Probably knock a site up in a week or so

It no harder than a spreadsheet

[Homshaw]

Didn't realise you'd already started it. Looks good to me

[businesstips]

Thanks for the information!

[Gav]

I use mr site pro for zazzygifts.com you might want to view it as an example.