I am developing a new site for a small business that requires a few pages (about us, contact, etc), a shopping cart, as well as some kind of blog feature that allows posting of upcoming product announcements with photos but without prices - and also posts on monthly contests. Viewers need to be able to comment on the blog postings and upload photos in connection with their comments. I can do all of this in the site builder that came with my web hosting service but the available templates are horrible and don't allow any customization.

I have downloaded the shopping cart creator and shopping cart designer trials and really would like to use this software. I find that it is easy to use and gives me enough flexibility to use my own image files and color preferences. However, I've looked at all the other CC products and I don't see one that will accomplish the blog feature I need. S-Drive would not be cost feasible for unlimited "contributors" plus I don't find that it allows photo uploads.

I am new to website development and have no html experience.

Sincerely appreciate suggestions on how I might get all this done with Coffee Cup software.

VSD with the S drive stream is a doddle to use, NO HTML NO FTP its newbie friendly

Stream allows 3 contributors to add PHOTO'S and text, from any email client including from mobile phones.

Trouble is as you say it becomes more expensive $5 month to allow 10 contributors consecutively.

? how many people at one time need access ? CC may have a solution

I too would lean to s-drive streams, with a few people at the company posting to the stream, the stream automatically posting to the company facebook page, and a free disquis account to handle the customer feedback, it is a fairly full featured thing for about 50.00 a year.

Viv - are you saying I would need VSP plus Shopping Cart Creator plus Shopping Cart Designer? I noticed in the trial version that VSP does not offer the same templates as SCD. Why not? This seems to force the purchase of SCDP if you want a consistent look. Is it possible to integrate S-drive with a site created in SCC and SCD?

The issue with the S-drive is that there is no option for customer feedback. There would only be two contributors from the company side but likely to be any number of contest participants posting their comments and design photos at any given time and likely to be different participants from contest to contest.

David - I checked out disquis and it looks feasible. Not sure how it would integrate with S-drive. Put a link to disquis on each company s-drive post for comments?

I have concern that without html experience I won't be able to put this all together so the site appears seamless from one application to another.

Many, many thanks for your suggestions!

Sandra,
When you set up an SDrive Stream (full-page themes), the option to use Disqus is right there, just click and it walks you through what you need to do. The comments section shows up at the bottom of each post. You can also set up your Stream to feed into your Facebook/Twitter accounts.

As for coordinating everything, you could start with the Shopping Cart Creator (and Designer), as it allows for additional pages to be added into it, so you might not need a separate VSD site at all. And, keep in mind, you don't have to use a theme, you can make it look however you want it to. It's a bit more challenging with the Streams because you need some CSS experience to go beyond the basic editing options, but if you find one that works for you 'as is', you could then use those colors in your Cart to pull everything together.

(I haven't looked at any themes in a while, so I don't know if there might be some matching ones for the Cart and Streams.)

Thank you, Paintbrush. I have a color scheme I want to maintain that corresponds to our logo. Do you know where I can view themes for Streams? I'm excited to get started.

Try the dashboard.
http://www.coffeecup.com/sdrive/dashboard/
Then click on the Stream tab then Customize Theme on the right hand side towards the top.

After a long day of hard work at least I have something to show for it (aside from a sore right shoulder)

http://twosistersmakestuff.com

Well, it's a start anyway.

The only problem I'm having is that disqus doesn't show up at my site. It shows up on my stream at CC but not at the site. Any ideas?

Many thanks!
Sandra

At this point I pretty sure Disqus only works with full page themes not embedded ones.

You can "embed" a full-page theme by putting it in an Iframe. I did that on my site because I wanted to use Disqus, but wanted the Stream to be part of the site.
It took a bit of tweaking to get the frame size right so there was room for the posts to expand (without having to have a scroll-bar).
Here's an Iframe 'how-to' from Eric's site:
http://progrower.coffeecup.com/iframe.html

...and he can tell you how to get that working in the Shopping Cart