Quote: (10-18-2014 09:41 PM)monster Wrote:
Use wordpress. Unless you ARE ready to pay big bucks (like 5k+) you're never going to get the site looking how you want it. You can learn wordpress really well in about 30-40 hours. There are lots of plugins that make things easy. You could use woocommerce for your shopping cart.
Instead of templates use Visual Composer with a really really basic theme to design your own site from the ground up
I made the mistake of paying a web design firm - actually the best in my town - $3000 for a website and they build some shitty looking wordpress site that I spent 50 hours myself making look professional. Needless to say, I'm not a fan of most web design firms & I like that now I know how to do it so I can create any site on my own relatively easily without paying some chumps in the future.
Youtube is your friend for learning WP, Visual Composer and all the other additional plugins.
Web design is a tricky field because a lot of it is subjective with regards to taste. Very few people actually have that good eye for design, I certainly don't and even if you're an expert on css and html, that isn't a guarantee that you can create a great looking site. There are also trends in web design, looks that are fresh and it can be subtle. For example there's a sort of minimalist trend recently using blocky design and cool pastel color schemes. Web design gets outdated very quickly too.
I'd rather find a graphical designer first with skills and creativity. Let them design a template in photoshop, then find someone else to convert it to Wordpress. You rarely find a great designer who codes, and you rarely find a great coder who designs. Having both in a smaller agency is also rare.