eCommerce Web Site Building: Where Do I Start? by Jacob Richards
Building a web site isn't something that is really cut and dry. There's a huge
variety of products and services that can either help you get your web site
where you want it or simply confuse you. It's also important that you make the
right choices upfront so that you don't end up having to restructure your whole
web site because of some problem in your design layout. The level of time
investment neccessary for mastery in a lot of these software packages can range
from little to a VERY significant amount. Because of this I feel it's important
to be lead in the "right" direction to make sure you don't spend time in the
wrong areas, or learning some software that might not be all that useful for
you later on (*coughs* Frontpage *coughs*).
Where you should start greatly depends on what you plan on attempting to do,
and how deep you're going to dive in. For a moderately professional, clean
looking web site without a lot of automation or intensive animated graphics you
can probably get by with some basic knowledge of html, ability with a good
WYSIWYG editor, and an image editting program. On the other hand, if you're
someone that's looking to build something that will really wow your audience
then you might consider spending some major time and developing some animation
skills with a program like Macromedia Flash. I personally always spring for
what I believe will bring me the greatest amount of profit with a minimal
amount of effort, and because of this I usually end up spending all of my time
diving in deeper with ONLY my WYSIWYG HTML editor, and my image editor.
## What is a "WYSIWYG" editor? ## A WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) HTML
editor is what allows you to get by with minimal knowledge of HTML. Yes, that
means you don't have to know EVERYTHING about HTML to have a decent looking
website. When you use a WYSIWYG editor it interprets what you're doing
(inserting an image for example) as being a certain series of HTML tags with
attributes, and does it for you... Thus, what you see on your screen is what
you get. Instead of seeing a bunch of HTML code in text format, you'll mostly
see what will actually show up in your browser once your web site is up WHILE
you're making it. I highly recommend using the latest version of dreamweaver --
it is well-known as one of the best HTML editors by general consensus.
Dreamweaver's interface is very friendly, has a built in FTP client, and is
specifically built to be flexible enough to suit both the coder and the
everyday amatuer webmaster.
## Image editing? What do I need that for? ## Okay, let's be realistic here: If
you're going to make a professional *appearing* web site it's important that
you can make some basic, decent looking graphics. There's a lot of graphics
problems that can truly get the job done, but as far as power and flexibility
goes I recommend Adobe Photoshop. Adobe Photoshop definitely takes some time
getting used to, but in the end it's VERY rewarding. I've ended up using my
knowledge of Photoshop to make not only graphics for multiple web sites, but
also touched up portraits, made business cards, flyers, and other online
advertisments such as banners. Infact, I've used it for everything except
animation... But it also comes with Adobe Imageready which is very good with
animation. This software is amazing, and if you're going to learn ANY image
editing software I recommend you start with Photoshop because of it's widerange
of overall... usefulness!
## Let's get me some sales! ## Kick off your new web site you've gotten up from
your knowledge of webmastering and image editing with a few new sales... Sounds
like a plan? Well a great way to do that quickly is with pay-per-click
advertising. BUT WAIT! Doesn't that cost money? Well... Yes. But with the tools
brought to us by some of the biggest pay-per-click advertisers out there we
should be able to make a good evaluation of how much profit we're going to make
without much investment upfront.
The big question behind pay-per-click advertising is whether or not it's worth
the cash when you can simply get traffic from regular search engine ranking
(otherwise known as organic traffic). Afterall, there are plenty of companies
out there that promise to help get you all the traffic you need through
optimizing your web site for organic ranking. The answer to this question is
quite simple: profit is profit. Through conversion tracking tools such as those
offered by Yahoo! Search Marketing and Google Adwords anyone can calculate
exactly what their profit is after cost of PPC advertising is taken out. In my
opinion, Google Adwords has the most user-friendly interface among the PPC
advertisers. Google Adword's interface makes it very easy to see which keywords
are pulling you in the most sales, and which ones aren't even worth your
advertising money.
Let us not forget, however, that in order to make those conversions we're going
to be needing a shopping cart! There's a lot of diverse software packages out
there you can use, but I've been using Mal's E-Commerce Free shopping cart for
a number of years with great success. The cart's server is hosted on their
machines so that means you not only get away with not having to pay for the
software itself, but you get out of having to buy an SSL security ticket too!
Nothing's a better bargain than free, eh?
## Getting those sales leads you've been building up to BUY! ## Once you've
scored a few sales it would probably be a good idea to start using some kind of
lead management services. I highly recommend the use of autoresponders for this
purpose. Autoresponders are, essentially, a newsletter sign-up that allows you
to strategically determine what you want to send each lead after a certain
alotted amount of time. For example, let's say someone visits your web site and
you offer them a free newsletter. If you were selling an ebook on some very
complicated topic, you might consider sending them only information on the most
basic concepts at first to get them interested. Slowly but surely, you can turn
those visitors that might have left your web site and never have returned into
some serious revenue!
As far as autoresponders go, I highly recommend the use of Aweber. Their
customer service is superb (seriously, these guys really know their stuff!) and
can be contacted at any point during the business day via online chat or phone.
They also offer tons of free information, and guides on making the most of
their services. Check out their month long free trial at
http://www.getaweber.com/ .
About the Author
Jacob Richards, the author of this article, currently runs a website on the
topic of building an ecommerce web site.
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