CUSTOM OR BASIC DESIGN?

The challenge of offering a totally custom website design without the need to spend a fortune on supporting the custom coding behind that design has been haunting us ever since we launched in 2009. Seriously how do you justify saying that the complete ecommerce platform will cost a few hundred dollars per month, but up-keeping your custom design will cost several thousand dollars per month? We FINALLY found a solution how you can build a website with a COMPLETELY CUSTOM LOOK AND FEEL without any cost of up-keeping it.

First let me give you a few facts. Most entrepreneurs fail to grasp that a unique, content rich, beautifully designed website will not be successful if it lacks the proper functions. Those functions have to be coded into your custom design, and whenever the code changes the custom design needs to change as well.

If you are doing a custom design for your website, there are literally millions of lines of code that hide behind that design. Whenever the code changes your website and your design will break. If you purchase one of those custom templates from Theme Forest (which may not be custom at all since anyone can download it), a lack of functionality is virtually guaranteed.

To date (April 2013), Shopping Cart Elite released 324 versions of the software. This means that something within the template got modified every single week for the past four years for a total sum of 324 times, and we are nowhere close to stopping the updates. This also means that if you design a custom website today, exactly one year from now it will be outdated by at least 52 software releases. This problem exists with any Shopping Cart Platform not just Shopping Cart Elite. Just like a new car leaving a dealership, it goes from being new to used, and devalues every single week from thereon. Your website is guaranteed to follow the same trend and will inevitably become outdated and redundant if you go totally custom.

In our research between all of our clients who have basic designs and custom designs, we found no evidence to suggest that custom design plays any role in helping the business succeed. If you look at the evidence outside of our research, Amazon and eBay close billions of dollars in sales every year despite the fact that their sellers all use the same website layout. Not only is the Amazon and eBay layout cookie cutter, but the sellers are also competing against each other in the same search and product results.

To avoid creating a maintenance nightmare for our company and our clients, between 2009 and 2012 we followed the web design model we call One Template to Unify Enhancements. In simple English, weve created one beautiful template that we up-kept for all of our clients. Each client website was unique, but the template had limitation on how custom you can make it look and feel.

One Template to Unify Enhancements served us well up until late 2012, when we signed up our first publically traded company that demanded a custom look and feel to go with their brand. Spending thousands of dollars on custom design alone, and then tens of thousands more to upkeep is not justified for more companies unless you understand the value of a brand.

Read: What is a Brand in Simple English?

In late 2012, we received a dozen more inquiries from companies who demanded a custom website that will match the look and feel of their brand. In addition, we finally planned to put shoppingcartelite.com on Shopping Cart Elite after 6 years and a custom template was necessary to make this happen. After months of brainstorming ideas for how to create Custom Design Website Layout without the need of Custom Coding whenever we release a new version of Shopping Cart Elite, we finally got it.

SOLUTION

Weve designed a dynamic website layout framework that allows developers and designers to customize a unique look and feel of the website without ever touching the custom coding behind the scenes. The weekly updates of Shopping Cart Elite will NEVER break the custom website design or leave it outdated. To give you an analogy, this is like buying a new car that evolves as time goes on instead of getting old and outdated. Your new car will not only be in a new condition forever, but it will never break or deteriorate. Every week your car will actually become better looking, faster, more secure, and more feature rich.

The framework is different from the one used by other Shopping Cart competitors. Shopping Carts who open up their templates to designers are encouraging a free for all, poor quality control and an invitation to unqualified designers to do work for their clients. Shopping Cart Elite is different because we still have control within the framework to ensure that the designer will create a custom look and feel within the Shopping Cart Elite framework, giving Shopping Cart Elite power to enhance and upkeep your website without the involvement of the graphic designer who is responsible of designing your website. In other words, you can have a totally custom design look and feel on your website within our framework, and never pay a dime to upkeep it or risk having it break in a year.

If you sign up with Shopping Cart Elite with a two year commitment, we will do a totally custom website graphic design for you at no charge (Applies to both new and existing clients). Just point us to a website that you love, or tell us what you want, and we will get it done for you. See example of a custom design here. (not the website is not complete)