Site creation…
With some essential basics of e-commerce site design out of the way, you’re ready to move on to the process of designing and creating your e-commerce site.
The first thing to say is that unless you are very proficient in HTML coding and design, building your site from scratch is probably not something you want to get involved in. Doing things this way is going to be a long and involved process, one that is likely to prove frustrating and difficult.
If the time that it is taking to do the job does not dissuade you from pursuing your goal, the frustrations that you suffer on the road to doing so may very well blow your e-commerce idea out of the water before it is ever even launched!
It is far easier and quicker to put together a list of what you want your site to do, how many pages you want it to have in the beginning with a list of products that you want to sell, so that you can submit the whole thing to a professional website designer. Having a site designed from scratch should not cost more than a couple of hundred dollars, which is money extremely well spent, because it frees you up to do things that are more likely to make money for your business.
An alternative would be to use a website template which you would then need to modify and alter to suit your own requirements. Doing this is not as difficult or time-consuming as designing the whole thing from scratch. Furthermore, as long as you have an easy to use, visual WYSIWYG (‘What you see is what you get’) HTML editor like the free Kompozer, you should be able to edit the template itself, which saves the design fee.
There are dozens of places where you can find free templates, starting within the cpanel of your Hostgator web hosting account (this will probably also apply to any other web host who uses a cpanel, but as every individual host is different, you would need to check).
When you open the cpanel (= ‘control panel’), it will look something like this:
Towards the middle right, you will note a link to ‘Website Templates’ (1), while on the left, you have a couple of simple site builder programs (2).
Hostgator lists templates in a couple of hundred different categories, so no matter what kind of site you building, there is likely to be something that you can use:
You can also find over 2000 no-cost website templates on the OSWD web site, and while these are not specifically e-commerce templates, you should be able to modify anything you really like to suit your requirements easily.
Using templates in this way makes creating your site a whole lot easier, but there is a one disadvantage. You are not the first person to have chosen the template that you are going to use to promote your business, so there may well be other businesses in your market that have an e-commerce site that looks like yours. However, the more modifications you make to the template, the less it will look like other
people’s sites, so it really is your decision to decide how much work you want to do on it.
Once you have got the site design the way you want it, the next step is to start populating that site with content. In simple terms, content is the information that you provide on the pages of your site, and it is important to understand that while many people might be looking at your site with the intention of buying the product you offer, still others are looking for information.
However, these people who are looking for information are also prospects for your business (they are reading your information, right?), so providing information is extremely valuable, as it will attract a continual stream of new prospects.
You should populate your site with articles about your business which focus on keywords, the latest news from your industry and any other information that would be relevant to the kind of people who are going to visit your site.
Sometimes, you may have the time available and the inclination to create articles of your own, but if not, there is nothing to stop you downloading appropriate articles from directory site like EzineArticles for re-publication on your own web pages. As long as you leave the original author’s information attached to that article, this is acceptable and within the rules of using the EzineArticles site.
Similarly, you might want to add video materials to your internal information pages, because net users are becoming increasingly familiar and comfortable with absorbing information from videos. You can look at sites like YouTube to see what videos might be appropriate to your market, and add them to your site.
You need to have your product catalogue, within which each listing is linked to an individual product page. From these individual product pages, you must allow your visitors to add products to their shopping cart before checking out.
You need a shopping cart. However, your trusty cpanel can come to the rescue once again!
Scroll to near the bottom of the cpanel page, and under ‘Software/Services’, you’ll see the icon for ‘Fantastico’:
‘Fantastico’ is a suite of software programs that are already installed on your web hosting account, so that all you needed to do is activate the programs you want to use. Click on the ‘Fantastico’ link to be taken to the list of programs available, scroll some way down the page and you will see a list of the ‘E-commerce’ programs that you can install on your site with no more than two or three clicks:
All of these programs can be installed on your site completely free (although Cube Cart is only free for a 30 day trial period), and each has their own strong points and weak points.
However, by preference, I would recommend that you consider Zen Cart for several reasons.
First and foremost, this is a shopping cart that I’ve used on many occasions, and so far, it has never let me down. It is elegant and simple to use on your side, while it is also straightforward and efficient on the client side.
Using Zen Cart also has another significant advantage. If you look on the ‘Recommended Services’ page, you will see that they already have certain merchant account companies integrated into the shopping cart system:
Zen Cart is also tied in with a couple of shipment handling and storage companies as well, so you can even integrate your shipping and delivery requirements with your shopping cart and payment processing system as well.
I would also suggest that you look at all three options to see which is the most suitable for your own requirements.
Incidentally, another combined shopping cart, payment processing and marketing resource that is well worth considering can be found at DELAVO.com. This is a very powerful solution that is often favored by online marketers because of the range of services packaged together, so I would recommend that you take a look to see whether what this company has to offer matches your requirements better.
Using the cpanel can also satisfy most of the other requirements you have for your site. For example, if you want a 24-hour chat utility, then you can use either Crafty Syntax or Help Center Live:
Most professional online businesses nowadays use a support ticket system for online queries that cannot be dealt with by a chatline operator, and the cpanel offers various helpdesk options.
Adding a degree of interactivity to your site is also a good idea, because doing so enables you to build a community that is centered on your business and the products that you supply. If you involve yourself in this community on a regular basis, this enables your customers to get to know you better, and that goes a long way to ensuring that they will continue to do business with you in the future.
You can do this using cpanel, either by installing a WordPress blog on which you can publish the latest news from your company, or by installing a forum where not only can you chat with your customers, but they can also send messages to one another.
Interactivity is becoming an increasingly important part of online business websites, so building this feature into your site from the beginning is a very powerful strategy that will assist your long-term business building efforts enormously.
Once you have built the shell of your website and added suitable content to it, all of the business functionality that you need to turn that site from being something that is a simple source of information into one where customers can get involved, meet other customers and buy products that they want can be added by using the cpanel and the programs contained therein.
Posted by Charlie Dee
on 12:02 AM.
Filed under
E-commerce
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