haydin

We are going to setup an online shop soon for our products (Actual, physical products). In order to assist our customers better, we need to setup a help-desk solution, which should have an integrated discussion forum and a file download area as well. Also, we would like to use a CRM to manage all our customer relationships, leads, campaigns, etc.

Looking at the available software (free or commercial) we were unable to find any solutions out there which combine all these functions.

What we want to achieve is this: A customer buys a product through our online shop. His contact information is immediately registered in our CRM and also in our Help Desk. He can login to our Help Desk and download supplementary software/documentation about his product. He can also login to the discussion forums with the same credentials that were used during the purchase.

Is this too much to ask? I would appreciate any recommendations.

I know quite a lot of people here are working on products where the company/product web site is of crucial importance. Often, the web site is the product.

But there are some of us who are trying to bring up non-web businesses. Our core business is embedded systems development. Our web page, although important, is not our core business. So we would like to spend minimal resources for updates/maintenance.

So far, we have been using Wordpress with a custom designed theme. The administration interface is great, it takes a few minutes to add a new post, etc. We were also relying on some plugins, most importantly WPML, for multi-language support, and some less important ones such as CAPTCHA tool, contact forms, etc.

Lately, we are getting frustrated with our setup. Every once in a while, there's an update to the core and when this update is pushed because of a security vulnerability, we would like to update our installation immediately. But then there is the issue of plugin compatibility. By using plugins, (either public/free ones or commercial ones), we essentially tie ourselves to a certain Wordpress revision, since plugins never update as quickly as the core and often they are incompatible with the latest Wordpress release.

Our experience has been with Wordpress, but we think this problem might be common with other CMSs. I'm not trying to make Wordpress look bad here, I think Wordpress is great and served us well so far, but it feels like we need to move on.

So the question to fellow HNers is: What solution you recommend for maintaining a web site to non-web startups? After our experience with Wordpress, we are even considering writing all our pages in plain HTML!

(Some stats/info if it helps: Our site has approximately 300 pages so far. We are adding about 6-7 per month. Soon we'll have a shopping cart and order processing system up. Traffic is not a concern, we simply don't have and probably never have a lot of traffic)