Support

Support

All 18th Street Software customers can contact their account representative to receive technical support, or can email the general support address at:

Frequently Asked Questions

General

Q: Why should I consider a shopping cart or content management system (CMS)?

A: If your site is moderately complex, keeping it up to date can require full-time employees. BananaPanel saves a lot of this labor, since we are able to create templates for your site and allow you to focus only on the parts of the site that change often, like your product catalog, press releases, and news sections.

Even if you have a communications staff, BananaPanel can still be very valuable. It features a very fine-tuned permission system so that you can let different members or groups of staff edit only the parts of your website they are allowed to. Our simple web services API lets your in-house developers connect to our servers and pull down your data into their own site templates, and you still get the benefits of our simple interface and database hosting services.

Q: What makes BananaPanel so special? Can't you get shopping cart software for free?

A: Yes and no.

There are many available programs that can allow you to set up a shopping cart on your website. Usually these come bundled with a credit card processing service, or as a stand-alone database and scripting language program that you need to have integrated for your website.

BananaPanel is much more feature-rich than any of the bundled applications, and lets you have precise control over how your site is displayed instead of forcing the vendor's preferred style. It doesn't cost significantly more than the labor required to integrate the stand-alone system to your site. In addition, we maintain and backup all of the databases on our own servers, provide a very easy interface for you to add new products and content, add new features all the time, and provide the BananaPanel updates for at no additional charge over the regular fee. There are a lot of benefits to a hosted solution that you simply can't get any other way.

Q: How much does BananaPanel cost?

A: There are two components to the cost of BananaPanel: An implementation fee to get your website integrated with the BananaPanel system, and a monthly fee to continue accessing the software. The implementation fee depends entirely on the complexity of your website, and is usually paid on an hourly basis. The monthly fee depends on site traffic and storage requirements for your database (relatively small) and product images. (relatively large)

So to answer your question, we don't know until you contact us!

BananaPanel is much cheaper in the long run than paying someone to maintain your site for you, since it lets you do most routine updates by yourself.

The BananaPanel Application

Q: On the catalog and product screens, what is the difference between a "category" and a "type?"

A: In BananaPanel, a product "type" is the prototype for a particular class of products. As an example, think of a musical album. Every album has a format (CD, tape, LP), artist name, album title, and so on. One album can be a the CD "Ziggy Stardust" by David Bowie, and another the LP of "Abbey Road" by the Beatles, but both have the same set of characteristics. That is a type.

A "category," on the other hand, relates to how you want to have your online store organized. You may have been to online stores before that let you drill down to specific product:

Catalog > Music > B > Beatles, The > Abbey Road

Each one of those steps leading up to "Abbey Road" is a category in BananaPanel. You can put different types of products in the same category if you would like.

Q: I can't send emails from the demo! Your system is broken!

A: No, it isn't. :)

Q: What as all that stuff under "Articles" in the demo? They don't look like articles to me.

A: BananaPanel currently has only three types of content that are managed, named "Content," "Articles," and "Events." These names can be confusing, so now would be a good time to explain.

Articles: Articles are any type of content that requires multiple distinct entries. A press release is a great example; a company will release many of them over time, but they all need to be stored and accessed, most likely using the same display template. You'll notice in the demo that we have lots of articles that just contain one or two lines of text. When you look at the demo website mentioned in the registration email, you can immediately see how these are used: to generate lists of albums for top ten lists, new album releases, etc. Our system is very flexible.

Content: These entries only occur once on your website. For instance, the text on your Contact page will not occur in installments. When you edit it, you just want it displayed on the website directly.

Events: Identical to Articles, except that the interface is slightly different to accentuate the date and time that the events are to occur. You would use these to display a schedule of classes at a school, for instance, or to show the upcoming performances at a concert hall.

We hope this clarifies things!