E-Commerce, or shopping cart, enables you to sell products and services online. There’s a spectrum of carts each with different features and levels of difficulty. Carts are usually easy to set up and use, and the drag and drop variety are the easiest. You’ll want an easy-to-use cart to start with, but that doesn’t mean feature-less. Many carts with sophisticated features are very easy to use.
A cart has many components, and the cart vendor will provide some or all. There’s a product catalog; a cart page that summarizes the products they’ve chosen; registration pages for contact and shipping information; and a page to enter payment information.
Carts depend on a credit card gateway service. You never see it, but it sends the order information to the credit card’s bank. The bank approves or declines the purchase. Upon approval, a confirmation page is displayed on the site, and the funds are deposited in your bank. The cart vendor provides the gateway service.
With some easy carts you’ll create the product catalog by adding photos, text and an Add-to-Cart button for each product. The easiest will enable you to drag and drop the Add-to-Cart button. This eliminates the need to deal with any programming.
As your product catalog grows in size, you’ll find that keeping it up to date is a chore. This is where a database-driven carts come in. These enable you to enter the product information into the database instead of on your pages. To edit a product, log onto the cart’s control panel. The cart creates the web pages automatically.
Database-driven carts can do shipping and tax calculations automatically. You can also sell subscriptions and gift certificates, take donations, and sell downloadable products like software, PDF files, photos, music, videos, and so on. They include extensive reporting, send confirming e-mails and receipts, accept major credit cards, e-checks, PayPal, and other forms of payment, and enable international sales. The drawback with a database cart is your pages may not look the same as your site. For some with many products, that trade-off may be fine. The 24/7/365 telephone rule applies to the cart as well. This is the pipeline through which your cash will flow.
7. Site Content
You already have most of the content for your site: logo; corporate ID; photos; marketing copy; testimonials; and policies and procedures. Gather these together and their digital files. Get the jpeg files, Word files, photo files and the source files from the programs that created them so you can modify them. Organize the content by page: Home page; Product Catalog; About Us; Contact; Policies; and so on. Put all of the files on your hard drive in appropriately named folders.
8. Page Design
A template is a head start in creating your site. Your web software may have templates. There are lots available on the Web. Get the HTML version of the template, not Flash or Photoshop versions. HTML templates are “sliced and diced” for you. The others require a lot preparation to get web-ready.
Don’t look for a template for your industry, but one that’s visually appealing. The template will be customized with your content. Of course, you can design your own page without a template, which is what most people do.
9. Creating Pages
The Home page is where visitors come first. Put everything on it that you want: graphics; buttons; and text. If using a template, replace everything that needs replacing with your content.
Duplicate that page, and then delete the things that are specific to the Home page. You’ll then have a template with the design elements that are common to all pages. For each page, duplicate your new template and add the page-specific content.
10. Search Engine Optimization
A search engine’s goal is to provide highly relevant pages to visitors. They have determined that the text on the page is one of the best indicators of relevance. Search engines read the text on your page. For each word, the engine analyzes font size, heading style, text style, vertical position on the page, and frequency of occurrence.
Make a list of keywords that describe your business and products. Use these keywords as much as you can since frequency counts. Optimize pages that make sense like product pages and the Home page, but not a contact information page.
People believe “meta tags” are required for high rankings. This was true in the past, and adding them won’t hurt. But what’s most important is the text of your page. There are various techniques devised to “trick” search engines. If you know of any tricks, don’t use them. The search engines ban sites that attempt to trick them — for life.
Off and Running
Follow these ten fundamental steps, and you’ll be off to a great start with your online business. Heed the warnings, and you’ll avoid the trouble many get into. Now, stop reading this and start planning your web site! HBM
Steve Cochard is founder and president of Back to the Beach Software, developers of Web Studio 4.0 web design software available at
www.webstudio.com. Web Studio is the easiest web design software to create and manage small business web sites. Cochard has been developing innovative, award-winning productivity software for over 20 years, including tools for word processing, contact management, business graphics, desktop publishing and web design. Cochard has designed software titles for companies such as Adobe Systems, Aldus Corporation, Silicon Beach Software, Vivendi Universal, Sierra Home, Knowledge Adventure, Houghton Mifflin, and many more. Cochard previously served as Director of Engineering at Adobe Systems. Cochard received his bachelor's of science degree from Penn State University.
Previously published in the June 2007 issue of HOME BUSINESS® Magazine, an international publication for the growing and dynamic home-based market. Available on newsstands, in bookstores and chain stores, and via subscriptions ($15.00 for 1 year, six issues). Visit
www.homebusinessmag.com
