Part Two: You’re Website – Setting up an E-Commerce Website

Yesterday we covered the benefits of starting up an online business and outlined the format for the rest of this guide. Today we are going to pick up from there and go through the process of setting up a website, what’s involved and the various routes to do it.

The great news is starting up a website is no longer a black art, and consequently it no longer has to cost the earth to do so either. There are 2 options on building a website depending on your budget, do it yourself or get a web agency involved.

Obviously if you go to a web agency you are going to get a high quality product (provided you select the right agency) which will most likely be a fully custom design with all the bells and whistles. If you are just starting out though, you won’t have the budget which is why we are going to show you a few ways to get a site which looks almost as good for only a few pounds. To give you an idea most web agencies would probably look for around 3k for an ecommerce website.

A website is broken down into 3 key elements:

1. A domain name – This is the address people type into the bar to visit (i.e www.google.com)
2. Hosting – Where you website is stored
3. The Website – This is where all your products will be listed.

The Domain

A .co.uk domain name will only cost you around £5 – 6 for 2 years and a .com a bit more at around £20. Here at DSM we use a company called 123-reg.co.uk who manage all of our client’s domains and found them to be superb.

Hosting

Decent premium hosting will cost you around £15 per month; you can get hosting cheaper but be careful what you are buying. Many with have limitations on the amount of traffic it can take and may not allow you to install applications onto the server.

You may be thinking “What Applications” well we will come onto this in more depth in a moment, but your website will be controlled by a piece of software called a CMS System this allows you to manage all of your content and products and needs to be installed onto the server. Many hosting providers will already have these applications are installed for you to make it easier, a good example for a host again would be 123-reg.co.uk

If you went to a web agency all of this would be done for you.

The Website

We are only going to briefly touch on this today, as the subject itself is enormous and would gone on endlessly. We are going to go over one way of getting an ecommerce website up cheaply and easily using a system called Magneto (which is open source).

Magento comes in 2 versions; a free community only support version or a professional version for the larger shops. To start with the community version would be more than adequate and for more information on Magento how to set it up, and configuring it go to Magentos website here.

How to make it look professional

Templates, the great thing about open source popular system is a number of designers build templates to sell in mass. You can buy them for around $30 and it will look as good as getting a professional job, the downside is it won’t be unique and you will find other shops around with the same design.

A great place to buy these templates is ThemeForest.

Overview

You now have your website with your items up and running your site looks great! Your well on your way to starting up your online business, a word of warning though setting up websites is a very lengthy process and takes time even when using pre built templates. Don’t expect to complete the whole task in just 5 short minutes. Tomorrow we will go over the various options of payment providers and how to process credit cards online.