need help, brand new to Zen Cart

hi all
I need LOTS of help. I'm brand new to building an online store and brand new to Zen Cart.
In fact I'm new to building websites in general.

I am finishing up on a site for my wife and need to add some product options and a shopping cart.
A already have all the products up on the site, with descriptions and pricing but just need to be able to get them to be selected and added to a fairly simply shopping cart.
There are some options I want the buyers to be able to have, such as on many of the products they can add a Text Personalization so i need a way to add that option in within the ordering process so they can choose that option if they wish on the product it's available for, input the text they want, and have the characters automatically counted and added in on the total sale (cost is per character of text).
I also need the customer to be able to able to have a place so they can upload a photo image to my wife to be added to the product.
I don't need many shipping options - all items will have a single, set, standard shipping price per item so no need to have any shiiping calculators or anything like that. i just need to be able to add the set shipping price per item onto the items list to be added in for the total sale.

That's about it.

It doesn't seem like it should be TOO complicated but I'm looking around the store admin panel and it's like reading latin to me - not sure where to even start!
Do I really need to relist all the items all over again in a store catalog when they are already on the site now?.

Here is a link to the site I just built so you can see what I mean.
http://www.lbkeepsakes.com/
if you look at the products (under PhotoThrow Styles) you will see every item listed and the price. The 'Buy Now" buttons are just images I put in for placement during the page layouts and they will be replaced with the real things when I figure out how to do everything.

Any help you all can offer me would be GREATLY appreciated!!
I'm utterly and completely lost here

Barry

Do you want the good news or the bad news?

The bad news is that you have a lot of work ahead if you choose to use Zen Cart. Zen Cart is designed to be the whole website not just a "buy now" type of cart.

The good news is that you can integrate your design and information into the Zen Cart program if you want and need the functionality we offer.

It's a nice looking site, but I'm afraid that you have got it back to front. In its normal state Zen cart can only add products that are in its database to its shopping cart, so yes you would need to add all you products to Zen Cart. Indeed, it would require significant programming effort to be able jump straight from your product pages to Zen Cart's shopping cart. It would be more normal to adjust Zen Cart's product pages to match your design. Indeed the whole of your site could be done in Zen Cart and this would probably be quicker than trying to hack Zen Cart to fit into the rest of your site.

Additional Note: Hadn't seen Kim's and Kobra's responses when I was typing mine - which is why you have three near identical but independent responses giving you what I suspect will be bad news.

This is a relatively common occurrence....Where one invests time and effort in to an html site and then just wants the "add to cart" function.

If you are stuck on this there are other avenues for you but Zen Cart is not modular and can not be sliced up to fit what is described above.

You need to evaluate the the future of this site and as you know a bit of html you also know that each product page must be built individually in your html scheme. And then if and when you change a design item, you have to edit all pages.

If you follow the leads and advice in using Zen Cart, you will make Zen Cart look like your site (header, footer, colors etc) Then Zen Cart will build all pages from the elements dynamically. Creating a product or a group of products then becomes a simple matter of entering the product info and image and Zen Cart creates the page.

Your site is one that can easily be transferred into Zen Cart. And there is much assistance here on the forum but you should first read the FAQ's and the wiki for the basics.

sigh

I was afraid of this...........
as much as I hate to say thissince I'm on the Zen Cart forums, I'm not "married" to using Zen Cart if it's not my best option.
Zen Cart happens to be one of three shopping carts I can choose that are offered by my webhosting server.
i'm just afraid all three are going to be the same issue now.

If I did this entire thing backwards in terms of building the site first than trying to integrate the cart into it afterwards, what is a better option for me to just add a cart?

BTW, I know NOTHING about writing HTML. I'm lucky to have found a program for my Mac computers that allows me to build a decent looking site without requiring any html or css coding abilities.

Sorry,

If you think about what I posted and if you envision this becoming a "BUSY" site and business....trying to manage many separate html pages, orders, payment methods, shipping methods, stock and all the other items that encompass an online business and that your current site does not address I think that you will find that using a stable application like Zen Cart (or another that you may choose) will benefit you many times over in the long run.

Have you considered how you are going to manage stock?
Sales?
Inventory?
email notifications?
payments?
etc?

Yes you can invest your time and effort in writing all of these into your site...

Or you can invest considerably less of your time into learning the basic requirements to add your elements to one of the packages available letting it handle all of these issues...and of course, here we are biased toward Zen Cart (and for good reason) as many of us, myself included, are only volunteer posters here and we could be on any site we choose.

Kobra

thanks for the response again.
As you can imagine it's more than a bit disappointing and discouraging realizing that all the time I've already invested in building the site may have been a complete waste of time now, especially since with my new current job I have very few free hours during the weeks to begin with and they have ALL been spent lately learning the other website building program and building the site.

I understand the points you are making though. Even simple things like email notifications could become a difficult issue trying to integrate into what i've already built.

i'll have to give this some serious consideration now to what direction is best to go forward with even if it means scraping what i've already done....... :(

BarryKim:

As you can imagine it's more than a bit disappointing and discouraging realizing that all the time I've already invested in building the site may have been a complete waste of timeI wouldn't see it that way at all. You have designed a very clean look and feel for your site that is better than many people ever achieve. Whatever path you decide to follow, the clarity that this brings will make it much easier for you to progress.

kuroi:

I wouldn't see it that way at all. You have designed a very clean look and feel for your site that is better than many people ever achieve. Whatever path you decide to follow, the clarity that this brings will make it much easier for you to progress.

thanks for the kind words about the site I built, especially since I'm brand new at doing any kind of website building........ but if it won't work for what I need it to do and i'm going to have to start all over again it's still very discouraging!
:(

I DO like the way the site is laid out though and I feel it makes it easy to navigate and easy to find what people may be looking for on the site without being too "busy" or confusing.

I only hope that if I do have to scap the site and start all over and rebuild it again in Zen Cart that I can acheive the same type of overall layout design.

Going back to to my first post and the options and abilities I need to integrate into any site for our use (the Text Personalization option that also automatically charges for the number of text characters inputted, the ability to add a photo upload back to me on each item ordered, and just a simple set shipping charge per item), does Zen Cart offer these abilities?
The LAST thing I want to do at this point is completely scrap the existing site, invest my time and effort into learning Zen Cart and rebuilding a new site again just to find out far down the road that I still can't do what I need to offer during the ordering process.

Thanks again

Barry

Barry,

Point by point:

Text Personalization option that also automatically charges for the number of text characters inputtedYES - Zen Cart has a text pricing function built-in and configurable.
the ability to add a photo upload back to me on each item orderedYES - Zen Cart has a built in file upload function
just a simple set shipping charge per itemYES - Zen Cart has several modes for shipping this might be "Flat Rate" shipping and it is a built-in Function.

Your options and I suggest that you install Zen Cart with the demo products, do DO NOT concern youself initially with styling the Cart....leave it as is and test the functionality only to determine if the functions will fit your need to minimize your investment in time until you are certian that Zen Cart is what will fill your bill. When satisified that it will, you can then style it to fit your requirements. It does not have to look like the end product to evaluate the functions.

Your current site layout is and will be easy to replicate in Zen Cart.

You might check your PM's

Kobra

thanks!
I'll most likely do what you suggest - see if I can do what I need to do first to check functionality and get a feel of the program than worry about look and styling.
As long as I know that it will accomplish what I need it to and you say the program has the capabilty to do the simple requirements I have than at least it's start.

BTW, I checked and I have no PM's

Barry