I\’m thinking about a little business to occupy me over the summer.
And I need to dig into the collective knowledge of you web savvy and development types for a moment.
The basic idea is to sell prescription specs online. Yes, OK, I know many people already do this but there is a wrinkle, a differentiator. Which, for obvious reasons, will remain unexplained for the moment.
What I want to know is, does anyone know of (or even where I should go looking for) a toolkit to make the building of the website simple?
Here\’s some windows based software called Optisoft, designed for instore use. It does the right sort of things. You enter the prescription, then you can play around with frames, upload a photo to see how the frames will look then when you\’ve ordered, it makes the order, runs the stock etc.
Some of this is standard to any web site selling stuff, others, like the prescription bit and the looking at the frames are subject specific.
Anyone out there in the open source community made a toolbox that would make this sort of thing easy? Commercially? Or would we need to either build the whole thing from scratch or partner up with a company that already had a web interface?
Any ideas?
Drupal
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Drupal
Is nice, and open source. But fiddly, if you have no experience.
Ruby on Rails is also worth looking at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ruby_on_Rails
Tim adds: To clarify my question. Has someone already used one of these (or any other development system) to create a system for selling glasses on the web?
Why not hawk your idea around the existing retailers? Least risk and quickest return.
have a look at OScommerce
http://shops.oscommerce.com/directory/Beauty_and_Health/Vision_Products
BlueVoda is easy to use. It’s also very powerful despite that.
Hi Tim,
It would not be difficult to do, but you would actually have to pay a web designer/database guy to put it together. I know people of both descriptions who work inexpensively on freelance projects, as they both have jobs.