A Mogul To Be

BANS - The Good, The Bad And The Ugly

December 31st, 2007 by Robert

I’ve built a few sites now using the BANS software package. After half a dozen or so sites, I’m going to give my impressions of the software. For this review I’m going to wear two hats. The first as a user of the software and the second as a software developer, which is my trade.

Background

BANS, a.k.a Build A Niche Store, is a PHP-based site builder for building eBay affiliate sites. It uses the eBay RSS mechanism to retrieve eBay listings and puts your Commission Junction ID into the link back to eBay. If a visitor to your site buys any item, not necessarily the one they clicked on however, you get a commission off of eBay’s commission.

The Good

I’m using version 2 of BANS, and have not had used version 1.3, so I cannot attest to using it. As I write this (late December 2007), version 3 is scheduled for release in a couple months with much needed upgrades.

Installation

The installation is pretty straightforward and simple. Just plug in the database information and you are pretty much on your way.

Store Setup

There are two paths to setting up your store. You pick a primary eBay category by entering the category ID and BANS will build out the menu based on the category and all of the sub-categories that go with it. Fairly simple. It also includes a link to the eBay listings where you can see the category numbers.

BANS includes the basics for search engine optimization. The URLs are human readable, and it will autogenerate some of the descriptions for you for each page. Both are important for SEO.

Site Look & Feel

BANS includes some templates that cover the basic layouts that you would need. Left menu, right menu, ads or no ads, you have 9 choices to pick from for you base site layout. They provide a nice guide on their forum for how the CSS is laid out along with nice color picker tool.

The Bad

Now for the drawbacks…

Store Setup

The confusion comes in when you want to build out a ‘custom’ store that doesn’t fit into the eBay category tree. Naturally I happened to take this route with my first store, which was built off of eBay Motors. The steps outlined in the manual were a bit confusing, but it all worked out.

When setting up each specific page, some of the configuration names are a bit confusing. For example, one of the parameters is Page Name. Well, this is the name in the menu. The other is the File Name. File name? What file? Turns out this is the URL you want. Not really a big deal, but it is a little confusing.

Site Look & Feel

While BANS includes some nice starting templates and a CSS file with some guides, going beyond these can be a bit of a challenge. For starters, a lot of the actual HTML code is embedded in PHP code. For a vast majority of software developers this is almost a cardinal sin. Separation of logic and view code is always better and not really that hard. For example, the menu is built out in such a way that is pretty difficult to change. The indention of each level, for example, is done via hard coded spaces using the   HTML entity. This could, and in my opinion, should have been done via CSS with each level identified with a class. Using this would have allowed the user to change the menu in many different ways without having to dig through PHP code.

Another example is the search form. Completely embedded in PHP code. The displaying of the eBay listings is another example. This makes truly customizing your site risky for the non-developer and a little frustrating for the rest of us. It would be nice if there were more options for displaying the listings, such as allowing for column views in addition to the three row options.

URLs & SEO

When viewing content and store pages, BANS will show nice URLs, as mentioned above. Where they failed in this in on searches. The search form is posted and that means that the search term doesn’t show up in the URL. With a site like this, searching happens quite often and by using the POST method for the search form, the user cannot bookmark their search and you, the site owner, cannot readily see the searched terms as good pageviews. In analytics you will see the /search url show up, but you don’t know what was searched. I’ve written about how to partially solve this by using Google analytics to solve this, but it should be a built in feature, in my opinion.

The Ugly

Now I have to put on my developer hat. I’ve already touched on the embedded HTML stuff. I have to admit that I have yet to meet a professional developer who writes software in that manner. Looking through the code, I see other examples that make me scratch my head and wonder why it was done in such a way. It is software like this that gives PHP a bad rap in the developer community, which is a shame because there is nothing really wrong with PHP as a language.

The other thing that made me cringe was the CSS file uses some basic no-nos. Font sizes are listed in point sizes and pixel sizes. That is a usability no-no. Some users for example increase their font sizes through either the OS or the browser settings. Using fixed sizing like points or worse, pixels, prevents that. The best practice here is to use ‘ems’.

A relatively minor thing was the code formatting. Developers like to be able to read code in a nicely formatted matter. Spacing and indention go a long way to readability. This code, was, well, all over the place. It made it quite difficult to see where blocks of code ended, which is important when you need to modify something. Suffice to say that the code quality left a lot to be desired.

In some ways you are locked into the templates provided. By this I mean that you have little choice in really customizing the appearance without hacking to code to bend to your will. The end result is that many BANS sites look alike, and that can’t be too good. Don’t get me wrong, there are some really nice and really different BANS sites out there, but the software doesn’t make it readily available to accomplish that.

Summary

While it may seem like I’m totally bashing the software, I’m not really. For the average user of the software it does what it is supposed to do and does it pretty well. Most people don’t know and don’t care about the code quality as long as it does what it is intended to do and is easy to use. In that respect it passes completely. The best analogy that I’ve come up with is buying say a nice Chevy or Ford vs. a Mercedes or BMW. The Chevy will get you from point A to B, do so comfortably and reliably and you generally have no problems. The owner of a Mercedes on the other hand knows they are buying a high quality piece of machinery. It will still get them from point A to B, but it has a lot more luxuries with it and a lot more power when they want it.

The best thing about BANS it is has a really good community of users that are very helpful on their forums. From traffic discussions, to customizing and other topics, it has a good following that is very helpful. I myself have contributed where I could, answering questions both basic and advanced. I’ve even done a few modifications myself, such as the XML sitemap generator (which should have been a standard feature) and adding the ability to track clicks using Google Analytics.

All told, BANS isn’t a bad piece of software, but it isn’t great either. I was disappointed with the polish and quality more than anything else. It would be nice if it were architected in such a way that allowed greater flexibility in customization so your site doesn’t end up looking like everyone else’s.

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