My wife’s company Brindy’s Giftables is starting to really ramp up. One of my first real projects as a web designer was to create a shopping cart system for her business. It proved to be very challenging, but very rewarding as well.

The company makes tags and titles and such for scrapbooking pages & photo albums. While I don’t actually get into scrapbooking, what she does is very cool and I respect the skill it takes. But I can get interested in the making of their website.

As I said, this was my first effort. I think it turned out well, even if I didn’t really do anything creative. Mechanically, it works well. After some hours of research, I settled on a popular open-source e-commerce package called osCommerce. Basically my search criteria were:

• Uses PHP as the scripting language
• Uses mySQL as the backend database
• Is easy enough for non-techies to maintain day-to-day
• Is attractive
• Has an active development community

So, osCommerce met all of these requirements very well. I don’t think that it will validate xhtml, but that was not important to me at the time. The site has stood up to the test of time, and that’s what counts.

I may post more here about their site here in the future if I end up doing cool new web thingies for you to look at.