Very nice site and graphics. For using Ubercart you will need drupal. On what is the site running now? Will you switch the whole site to drupal - worth thinking about...

Basically, you or someone else are able to theme the site in drupal, especially if you got all the CSS stuff ready and well documented. Modules like panels 2 will make it easier even if your not familiar with the theme functions

Cheers,
Amitai

If you'll implement UC in drupal, my guess is that you will quickly decide to move all your site to Drupal. One - scalable -system makes sense.

I'd recommend you to 'check' how to move your site to drupal. my quick tips would be to install drupal locally and familiarize yourself with the following modules:

* CCK, Views - don't leave home without them
* Panels 2
* Nodequeue
* Ubercart

Good luck, and welcome to Drupal

Looking at your site, it seems to me that it would be a very quick job to move it all into Drupal. Then you would get Ubercart and all sorts of other functionality for free. Just installing Drupal, learning how to use it, configuring options, and moving all your pages will take a day. The harder part is to preserve the site design. For that you will have to do a bit of learning about how to theme Drupal sites, but again this shouldn't be difficult, given your experience and existing design. (The biggest problem I have when theming is doing the design in the first place, and making the css work the same in a majority of browsers!) A nice side effect is when you've ported your design to a Drupal theme, everything you add from then on, whether Ubercart or something else, will share the design.

In bringing up my site, I've been through three shopping carts (oCSMax, drupal/ecommerce, drupal ubercart). Each time I've had to reload all my products. My last choice was going to be Zen Cart, but thank goodness, I don't need to go there. Right now, I'm doing Drupal/Ubercart, and I highly recommend it. I have been happy, except for one or two glitches that I am working my way through, using this forum. Do not under any circumstances load drupal/ecommerce. DO NOT LOAD IT! I did and had to blow everything away, before loading ubercart. I tried ecommerce, it has many fatal errors and basically is not a functional shopping cart.

Worse of all the ecommerce developers are basically non-responsive. A big, big, benefit of ubercart, is you get an answer to your question on the forum, not so in ecommerce.

From your posts it seems like you are comfortable with PHP and CSS. That is all you need for Drupal. Drupal is very robust and for the most part bug free. It takes a little time getting used to their menu system, but once you do you realize you have complete control of your site and it's appearance without any coding, which means that non-software savy store operators can learn how to change products and pricing on the site easily. You can set a user's catagory for store administrator, and set permissions on what they can and can not do.
I assume you already have a server. Install Drupal, and MySQL through your server cpanel, and then install ubercart. I had some hookup problems if I installed everything through the ubercart install script. Don't know why, but installing through the server is better. Drupal requires a database. You do not need to know anything about PHP or MySQL to use Drupal/ubercart. That is underneath the hood. If you want to know how it all works there is only one book that's worthwhile, and I highly recommend, "Pro Drupal Development" by John V. VanDyk and Matt Westgate.
Advantages of Drupal: fast screens, search engine friendly, complete content management of your site, sizes well, even into multiple sites, your website appearance can be made to look identical through Drupal themes and your css file which themes uses.
Why use ubercart: This is by far the best checkout shopping cart I've ever seen anywhere. It has a one page checkout and a nice store administration panel behind. The others don't come close to it's ease of checkout. Since, it uses Drupal, it works and works fast. But the absolutely best part, is you can write in this forum and get some feedback. Welcome...to Drupal/Ubercart and the forum.

Hi Ron,
Did you get the PM I've sent you?

Amitai

yes, sorry. not an office day for me, so i haven't had time to respond. i will try to tonight after working the store (we also have a brick&mortar) today.

thanks for your efforts and initiative!

Dan:

Thanks for the rundown on the carts. My present host, just found out, can move the site to another server with updated PHP and MySQL. However, it would appear that the move would require that I reload the entire site. Thus looking at what Blue Host has to offer as it sounds like a much better deal and they have a number of carts already available. However, no Uber at this point. i.e. once Uber hits Beta and beyond it would be great if Uber would start to appear as a listed cart option with these larger hosts.

The key is that hosts offer other carts on their systems and if I am working with a client they often desire the least expensive solution. Have a Uber cart up and operational but was interested in hearing what others have to say about alternatives.

Jim