I am a total web site virgin , and several friends and I are pooling our efforts to start a small business, selling handcrafted and painted items. Much of our business will be made going to dog and horse shows and selling from a booth , but a healthy portion can be made selling on line, as well.
The problem is , none of us know the first thing about setting up a web site. Do any of you have any experience selling items thru a web site? What type of sites do you recommend? We need something fairly cheap , that we can change pictures on frequently.
Any help you can give will be very much appreciated !
First of all, websites are really cheap these days. <$10 a month can get you a nice service with tons of space and plenty of tools. I have my own site on a different service but I know a lot of people here like Godaddy.com.
To keep it basic. You use a domanin name search engine to find an available name that you want, you pay a few dollars to register it, and then you pay a service to host the site for you. The service can often do the registering too if you want but some people don’t recommend that.
You should select your service based largely on the tools available. Many services have point and click tools to let you build a professional looking website in less than a few hours. Alnog with your site, you will get e-mail addresses in the form of youchoose@yourdomain.com. You can use those however you want. Most services also give you free, easy to use packages that you can use for e-commerce. They provide you with those little shopping baskets and credit-card processing tools.
You really just need to decide what you want and then just jump right in and do it. Modern tools make it possible for someoine with zero experinece to build a website from scratch.
FYI - Until you have registered your domain name, do not tell anyone its name in a public place. People have been known to register the name ahead of you, often along with variations, and then sell it back to you for an inflated price.
I went to godaddy.com and THOUGHT I was signing up to create a web site, but evidently all I did was pay almost $60 to register my domain name :smack: . This is all well and good, because according to them, CritterCreations.US is all ours now.
But NOW WHAT?? I want a web site to SELL dammit!!
I am too freakin’ tired to do anything about it tonight, but can’t someone point me in the right direction? Pretty please?
The topic is too broad to be addressed in a SDMB thread, but essentially you’ll need three things:
A domain name (which you’ve already got, apparently)
Stuff to sell
A web site
#3 can be trivially easy or really complicated, depending on how elaborate or how simple you want. You could, for instance, just have a few static pages showing your products, and have customers send you emails when they want to place an order. Conversely, you can have a professionally-designed, dynamically-created, easily-updated e-storefront that provides shopping carts and user accounts, tracks your inventory, accepts credit card numbers, and automatically sends off the orders once they’re placed. As with anything else in life, how elaborate you want to go depends on how much you’re willing to spend.
Well, if your running it as a business or at least wish to , then you might want to treat it as a business. My first piece of advice is to contact your local college or vocational school and locate the part that trains students on how to create web pages and whatnot.
They can in turn put you in contact with idividuals who have either since graduated or in school at present , allowing you to leverage what money you do have against a semi or professional website designer who can work with you in getting what you want, or at least picking up a design template and instructions on how to use it.
Its a win/win if you decide to go this route , the designer of the template owns the rights to the design , while you own the content, allowing you to do what you do best.
Take a look through the message boards at http://www.webhostingtalk.com. Compare good Web hosting companies; many offer packages of e-commerce-related scripts free with the hosting package. Hosting is so cheap, you shouldn’t try top save a few bucks by going with a questionable hosting company. Pair.com, A Small Orange, and HostGator have pretty good reputations, but there’s more out there; have a look around and see what best suits you.
Try to stick with a Linux/Unix-based account. You’ll have a difficult time trying to run some e-commerce scripts on a Windows-based server.
Don’t register a domain name in the .info or .biz TLDs. They’re known for spam and creepy businesses like online pharmacies, credit counseling and the like. .org is usually associated with a non-profit organizations, and .net seems to get lost in the shuffle. Stick to .com or a country designator TLD (.us, .ca, etc). Until the end of January, North Americans and Europeans can get free .be (Belgium) domain names for a year through EuroDNS.
Godaddy is usually the cheapest registrar. It’s fairly reliable, but they’re quite annoying with the constant upselling attempts. I keep my primary domain name with Network Solutions – they can be expensive, but they’ll be around forever – and other names pointing to it with Godaddy.
Look for a hosting company that offers Fantastico; it’s a control panel feature that will install other scripts such as shopping carts and content management systems with one click.
The easiest and simplest GoDaddy setup I tested cost $44.65 for a domain name registration and site hosting for a year. I think you took a wrong turn at Albuquerque.
Do NOT get Web hosting through a registrar. The capabilities of the site will be minimal, support won’t be that great, and it’s far more expensive than hosting the site with a company that offers only Web hosting.
I wouldn’t recommend GoDaddy for hosting, if only because they tend to drag with the software and security updates. Domain name registrations are okay, but that’s as far as I’d take it.
