Suggestions for Buying Design Templates ASP site

[VDCUSA]

Hi there. I have searched and searched to find a basic, affordable design template for sale. The ShopSite approved merchants are way beyond my budget. I find others out there (templatemonster for example), but they only seem to offer os or php based templates for ecommerce (?).

I am building an ASP site,using Dreamweaver CS3, have a shared Windows server hosting account. So- do I have to buy an ASP labelled design template, or can I find something in the $150-$300 range and just use parts of it (ie, strip out php code, etc.)

To me, the interface of ShopSite is too labor intensive and repetitive (constantly looking for ways to speed up my site build- I have to build a site serving 3500 skus)

Point is- seems like I can work my way around the product by product Back Office setup, but must have my design established and go through ShopSite's basic "set up your pages" structure first- right?
ACK. This is so counter intuitive and backwards to how I have built sites in the past.

ANY help, suggestions on how I could get through the design aspect first is greatly appreciated= links, suppliers, etc. I don't have time to design the site from scratch as well and would never use the ShopSite built in design templates- looking to buy a design, and redo it in our corporate HEX color guide, etc.
THANKS!

[MgmtSpec]

Hi,

Unfortunately these often don't go together...
As far as custom design - I can tell from experience there is a learning curve so anyone selling custom templates for cheap is selling themselves short. There is typically great help on the forum but a lot of hours can go into a true custom template. Chances are a custom template developer also knows the basic functions very well and could help in other areas.

You can easily build pages just using an excel/tab delimited spreadsheet. As well as bulk upload your data. That takes the labor out. We've done as many as 40,000 products at once for a client this way. It's by far the easiest bulk management ecommerce systems I've seen and I've been doing this since 1996.

Good Luck!

[VDCUSA]

Hi there- Thanks for your reply. I guess I get that I can bulk upload with an Excel spreasheet (did find that bit the other day in ShopSite doc's) to solve for the number of sku's). That seems so kludgy, but I guess that is where that is at...

As far as the design side, I am still a bit lost on the terminology of the ShopSite system and it's containers and coding...Stuggling to understand better how to get to custom and the look I want (but sure it is my over reliance on how I have previously "done things").

Everything seems so tightly wrapped up in the SS system. versus to me, I would develop a set number of pages (basic site layout) for:
- Product page level [display a single product]
- Page that displays "By Category" selection
- Page that displays Search Results (site search)
- Page that displays "By Brand" selection
and have all pages have design containers that display other data sets (Sales, specials, cross sell, suggestions, product reviews, etc)- hence asp pages, and calling data on page from server side

looking at the templated php products out there, they seem more intuitive and pages come pre-loaded with the data sets behind the design elements- but I am already locked in to the ShopSite structure with Windows server (hence, going with .asp pages, deving site in Dreamweaver).

Decided to go with a purchased flat html template, play with design elements in Fireworks, and bring that back into Dreamweaver/site dev structure. See how it goes- especially as it relates to documentation on how shopsite and their coding/tags works with those pages (so, I guess I am doing it all, after all- LOL)

Am I just over analyzing ShopSite? ACK!

Appreciate the dialogue and any help anyone can share- I promise you, when I get through this, I am scheduling myself to regularly come here and see if I can share my experiences and insight with others/pass back some help. Thank you!

[Jim]

The step you say you use are the same steps you would use for ShopSite. The only thing extra that you would do would be to convert your html page to a template using the template tags to place the information from your ShopSite configuration, page information and product information into the html when the pages get generated.

Have you reviewed the online help for creating templates? You might want to read through the tutorial at http://www.shopsite.com/templates/tutorial/.

If you have specific question on how to do something please post a question and we'll see if we can help. If you have a url to a sample page you are trying to work with post the url and we can give you pointers on how you would convert it.

[VDCUSA]

okay-thanks. Maybe I will get better at it as I go through it (i'd better! lol) Only difference is I will be converting/saving the html template page into saved .asp pages. (hence all the previous info about how I see the pages)
I understand ShopSite will let me save pages as the .asp extension.

Thanks for the specifics- I am sure I will be posting links, etc. here as I run into breaks I can't seem to solve on my own.
Great resource= Thank You!