Building Ecommerce Websites: Where Do I Begin?
Building a website isn't something that's really cut and dry. There is a great variety of products and services that can help you get on your website where you want it or simply confuse you. It's also important to make the right choices in advance so you don't have to restructure the entire website because of some issues with your design planning. The level of investment in time needed to master a lot of these software packages can range from a little to a very large amount. That's why I feel it's important to be a leader in the "right" direction to make sure you don't spend time in the wrong areas, or learn some software that might not be useful to you later (* cough * front page * cough *).
Where you should start depends heavily on what you plan to try to do, and how deep you dive into it. For a professional website that is mild and clean looking without much automation or intense animation, you can probably get some basic knowledge of Html, ability with a good WYSIWYG editor, and photo editing software. On the other hand, if you're someone looking to build something that really wows your audience, you might consider taking some big time and developing some animation skills through a program like Macromedia Flash. Personally, I always get what I think will make me the most profit with the least effort, and because of this I usually end up spending all my time diving deeper with my WYSIWYG HTML editor and photo editor.
What is the editor of "WYSIWYG"?
The WYSIWYG editor (what you see is what you get) HTML is what lets you get the minimum knowledge of HTML. Yes, that means you don't have to know everything about HTML to get a decent-looking website. When using the WYSIWYG editor, it interprets what you do (e.g. enter a photo) as a certain series of HTML marks with features, and does it for you... So what you see on your screen is what you get. Instead of seeing a set of HTML code in text format, you'll mostly see what will actually appear in your browser once your website is turned on while you're making it. I highly recommend using the latest version of the Dream Holder - it is known as one of the best HTML editors with the general consensus. Dreamweaver interface is very friendly, has a built-in customer in FTP, it is specially designed to be flexible enough to fit both the programmer and the daily amateur site manager.
Edit photos? Why do I need that?
Well, let's be realistic here: if you're going to make a professional site * pop up *, it's important to make some decent-looking basic graphics. There are a lot of graphics problems that can really get the job done, but in terms of strength and flexibility, I recommend Adobe Photoshop. Adobe Photoshop certainly takes a while to get used to, but ultimately it's very rewarding. I ended up using my knowledge of Photoshop not only to make graphics for multiple websites, but also to touch photos, business cards, flyers, and other online advertisements like signage. I used it for everything except cartoons... But it also comes with Adobe Imageready which is very good with animation. This software is amazing, and if you are going to learn any photo editing software, I recommend that you start Photoshop because of its general breadth... Interest!
Let's get some sales.
Go from the new website that you got from knowing about setting up sites and editing photos with some new sales... Sounds like a plan? Well, the great way to do it quickly is to pay per click. But wait! Doesn't that cost money? Okay... Yes. But with the tools brought to us by some of the biggest advertisers who pay to click, we should be able to make a good assessment of how much profit we will make without much investment in advance.
The big question behind paying per click is whether it's worth the money or not when you can simply get traffic from a regular search engine rating (also known as organic traffic). After all, there are plenty of companies that promise to help you get all the traffic you need by improving your website for an organic rating. The answer to this question is very simple: profit is profit. Through conversion tracking tools like those offered by Yahoo! Search Marketing and Google Adwords can anyone calculate their profits exactly after withdrawing the cost of PPC ads? In my opinion, Google Adwords has the most user-friendly interface among PPC advertisers. The Google Adword interface makes it very easy to see which keywords attract you in most sales, and which ones aren't even worth your advertising money.
However, let's not forget that in order to make these transfers, we will need a shopping cart! There are plenty of varied software packages that 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 server is hosted on their devices, which means you not only get away with having to pay for the software itself, but you get out of having to buy an SSL security ticket too! Nothing better than a free deal, right?
Get these sales leads that you're building to buy!
Once you get a few sales, it's probably a good idea to start using some kind of lead management service. I strongly recommend the use of self-packagings for this purpose. Self-addresses are, essentially, a newsletter subscription that allows you to strategically determine what you want to send each guide after a specified period of time. For example, let's say someone visits your website and offers them a free newsletter. If you're selling an e-book on a very complex topic, you might consider sending only information about the simplest concepts at first to get them interested. Slowly but surely, you can turn those visitors who may have left your website and never returned to some serious revenue!