Shopping Cart Tutorials

Do It Yourself Store Design- What resources are available to help a person build an ecommerce site without paying for professional web development? This article explains the basics of do it yourself store designs and the tools you have to build a website.

The Usefulness of Prepackaged Systems for Store Design

Prepackaged systems can be extremely helpful in do it yourself store design. There are templates offered by web hosts, web developers, and web development software programs, web building applications offered by most web hosts, and custom design ability in the leading web design software including FrontPage from Microsoft, Dreamweaver from Adobe, and iWeb from Apple.

Templates and web building applications offer the developer a number of highly useful elements, including the following:

• A choice of color schemes. Most of us don’t have a lot of experience in interior design, graphic design, photography, or other areas in which the fundamentals of color grouping are taught. Looking at what’s offered for free can help us get a sense of colors we might want to use, as well as color schemes that we reject out of hand.

• Layout choices. Similarly for page layout as for color schemes, seeing examples of what others have done can give us ideas for what we do and don’t want to do on our own site. They can help us choose whether we want a left or right frame, and how many columns we want to work with.

• Positioning of key items. Through template samples, we can become aware of practices that—if not exactly standard—still can help make a website predictable to the user and make it easier to get around in, including the location of such critical items as menus, navigation, search facilities, and contact information.

• Built for accessibility. Prepackaged items are likely to meet the Alliance for Technology Access guidelines for making websites workable for people with a variety of disabilities, including visual impairment.

• Built for speedy loading. When you’re offered a choice of images in a template or web builder, you can be pretty sure that they’ve been optimized for quick loading.

• Built to work on all major browers. Rather than having to test your website on Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Safari, not to mention Opera and Google Chrome, you should find with professionally designed, prepackaged stores that there will be wide compatibility built in.

If you do choose to work from a pre-packaged product, make sure it was built for ecommerce and can work with the shopping cart you want to use and the means of payment acceptance (for example, a merchant account, PayPal, or Google Checkout) that you wish to use.

The Open Source Approach

The applications called shopping carts can actually have the ability to create a full website, but possibly with rather restricted choices unless you are capable of coding. AgoraCart and Zen Cart are two examples, and may also be used with websites developed in other ways. For example, many web hosts offer FrontPage capability and a choice of these two shopping carts.

Taking Matters Into Your Own Hands

If your store website has special needs and you have the capabilities, you can provide it with elements that are not likely to be found in pre-packaged do-it-yourself websites. (Alternatively, if you need specialized elements, you can hire a web developer.) These capabilities and features may include such elements as a site-wide search engine to help your customers locate products. Another feature you may have difficulty finding pre-packaged is the ability to add multiple product photographs, or have the photographs zoomable. You may be limited by pre-packaged site development packages in the number of pages you can have, the number of items in your catalog, or the number of menu items you can have. You may not be able to easily integrate Live Chat for customer support or have the site display as you would wish for clients who have large displays, high tech capability, and high expectations for website functionality, or on the other hand, you may find that the pre-packaged installations do not take mobile viewers of your site into account. You may also find that templates look like what they are: templates, and this can be concerning if you are trying to give your site a unique and professional look. However, these are all items that you can add and control if you have the skill and resources to do so.

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