[Chris_wrx]

Hi guys new to this site hoping to gather some info on website design. I am looking to design an ecommerce website to sell my products on. Looking for the best way to design this site myself. I have come accross various site that offer the ability to make one of these sights online. The worry is that If i am luck enough for my site to gain a lot of business, should the sight i am using for my website design and hosting goes out of business i would lose my website. Does anyone know of a good software package i could use to make my site and upload it to a server or web host of my chioce.

Sorry for the long post.
Thankns for reading

[jamesosix]

Hi, welcome to the forums

May I suggest a few choices:

1. You can do it yourself, but if you have a bricks and mortar shop to run, setting up a fully working and clean website can be a real hassle (even for people who do it for a living). If your business is making a decent profit I would personally suggest outsourcing the job to somebody who is proven at web site design. Dont bother with agencies, try and find a local freelancer who maybe others have used and could recommend.

2. If you decide to go it alone, then I would suggest using wordpress. Its free and once you get the hang of it its dead easy to use. You can a ton of plugins that all do various things, including e-commerce.
Tbh for somebody just about to 'dip their toe in the water' I wouldn't suggest doing it yourself. Yes you could probably save a lot of cash, but the likelihood of a) your homemade website getting good traffic and then B ) that traffic actually clicking the buy button are two enormous steps that can be both time consuming and stressful.

Of course, it can also be fun and give a massive sense of achievement, but that is highly unlikely if you went it alone imo.

Think of it like this:
Sure I could go to the dentist for a tooth removed, or I could do it myself....me personally I would rather pay the professional to do it to the best of his or her ability.

Good luck

This post has been edited by jamesosix: 25 January 2012 - 12:11 AM

[brightonmike]

I think the problem with doing it on your own is it could be many months of trial and error before the website is up to scratch and generating business.

During that time you'll have lost business, possibly even gone out of business. A hands-on approach is always admirable but if you really don't even know where to start and this is critical to the success of your business, then you must outsource.

[nfc212]

Chris_wrx, on 24 January 2012 - 07:21 PM, said:

Hi guys new to this site hoping to gather some info on website design. I am looking to design an ecommerce website to sell my products on.

How many products are you offering?

A couple, a couple of hundred or a couple of thousand?

Chris_wrx, on 24 January 2012 - 07:21 PM, said:

Looking for the best way to design this site myself. I have come accross various site that offer the ability to make one of these sights online.

Yep, seen a few of these and some truly are a "sight".

Chris_wrx, on 24 January 2012 - 07:21 PM, said:

The worry is that If i am luck enough for my site to gain a lot of business, should the sight i am using for my website design and hosting goes out of business i would lose my website.

If it gets that busy your bandwidth charges will keep them in business.

Chris_wrx, on 24 January 2012 - 07:21 PM, said:

Does anyone know of a good software package i could use to make my site and upload it to a server or web host of my chioce.

If you only have a fairly low number of products then you could try a WYSIWYG package like Serif's Web Plus, WYSIWYG Web Builder, Magix's Xara Web Designer, there are other similar packages. All those named include built in E-Commerce tools such as Pay-pal, Roman Cart and Mal's Cart.

Note however that these are not suitable where you are likely to have hundreds or even thousands of products on offer.

Products like this are designed to create static HTML sites rather than dynamic database driven sites. They also only create fixed width and height pages and all objects are absolutely positioned. There is also a preponderance of inline styles. However if you know how to use a DTP program you can whip up some decent looking pages quite quickly and easily. They are very popular with artists who want to build a showcase for their work to their own design and vision. Where the artwork and presentation is more important than the technical function.

Whilst products like these can appear an ideal remedy please take note of the cautions in the other posts in this thread. Don't do it right and you could do more harm than good. The design and appearance of the site is only one aspect. You must also consider technical function and of equal if not greater importance, SEO and marketing. Using a good designer/developer will, or should, cover these areas for you.

[porkchops]

I'd STRONGLY recommend hiring a good designer to design the UX and front-end of your e-commerce store and having a professional developer implement it. It's not going to be cheap (though you might be able to have a designer skin a pre-built ecommerce solution for a couple grand) but you can't skimp with security, especially if you are coming in contact with credit card information.

Doing it incorrectly could bankrupt you if you get fined or sued for a mishandling of credit card information.

Sites like Shopify are affordable and allow designers complete control over the front-end. It's a hosted solution meaning you just pay a monthly fee (which is about the same as you'd pay for hosting anyways) and get access to their security. There are other hosted solutions out there, but shopify is the only one I'm familiar with.

Do it right. A normal website is a great investment in your business, but an e-commerce site has to be done well or it's a liability.

[Bomb]

Alternatively install OpenCart, link it to your payment provider account, install a free template & tweak the design to suit. This way you should have a fully functional store "out of the box", while you get your hands dirty learning the code.

Good luck!!

This post has been edited by Bomb: 26 January 2012 - 08:58 PM

[mtinnin]

Honestly I would recommend looking for tutorials on how to design a website. I would show you a few links but I'm not sure if i can post them.

Try Web design Tutorials and then you will need to learn HTML/CSS.

[SamDavy]

I would never dream of putting anyone off building a website for themselves for the first time but it sounds like you shouldn't go it alone. Take all the advice from the posts above, remember this will be your business and it should look professional and be secure, something i don't think you will be able to achieve on your own.
But if you wish to take that choice good luck.

[mattds]

Chris_wrx, on 24 January 2012 - 07:21 PM, said:

Hi guys new to this site hoping to gather some info on website design. I am looking to design an ecommerce website to sell my products on. Looking for the best way to design this site myself. I have come accross various site that offer the ability to make one of these sights online. The worry is that If i am luck enough for my site to gain a lot of business, should the sight i am using for my website design and hosting goes out of business i would lose my website. Does anyone know of a good software package i could use to make my site and upload it to a server or web host of my chioce.

Sorry for the long post.
Thankns for reading

As a rule to prevent this happening i never buy hosting and domain from the same company. Split them up and at least you hold on to you domain if the hosting goes down.

E-commerce websites can be quite a big job to code from scratch. Have you thought about using a content managment system instead. eg Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress. You use these to create and then manage your website and they come with some great features.