[ic] Deciding between Interchange and Miva (Questions)

[Jeff Dafoe]

> And shop.sophee.com is good example of what cane be done...
> That site sure has raised the bar... ugh.

It's important to keep in mind that the only difference between sophee and
every other site here is the approach to the design of the site.  sophee's
design was done by a professional graphic designer, a guy by the name of
Jerry Mica (www.numartingroup.com) .  Jerry basically never looked at
Interchange when he did the wireframes and PSDs ( you can see those at
http://www.cmainteractive.com/clients/sophee/ ), the software had to fit the
design and not vice versa.  Most of us are content to just modify
Foundation, but it's important to remember how much of a difference
professional design can make.

I don't want it to seem like we did something amazing because we really
didn't...  Mike and crew did something amazing by creating Interchange and
managing to hide it from most of the world.  Hire a great designer and any
of you can have a site that looks just like sophee, largely because the
Interchange "people" already wrote the software that can easily provide that
level of customization.  The thing that I think sophee brings to the
interchange table is a reminder that IC is, at heart, not just a shopping
cart program but a full-blown ecommerce engine (and more).  To really take
Interchange to new levels you've got to see Foundation for what it is, a
reference implementation / demo, and don't limit yourself with it.

Jeff