As a pro web designer with over 10 years experience it pains me to say this but if you’re starting out with an online business the key is do do things as cheaply and more importantly basic as possible and once the site achieves a high search engine placement, then you can use your experience, not guess work and expendable profit to reinvest in the design, branding and features of your website.
Time after time we get briefs from new business start-ups who dont have any cash but have grandioso ideas about the features and functionality required of their online store. Most of the time this is all wishful thinking an not really based on customer objectives and in the end our quote often makes them lose faith in becoming an online business.
So do yourself a favour…
- Get an SEO involved for advice
- Buy a domain for a few pounds, get some hosting (beefier the better if you plan on using Magento… more on this below)
- Set up the email properly and integrate with Outlook
- Find some open source ecommerce software like Magento Commerce, Prestashop or others
- Use the standard theme!!!!! just change the logo (make sure it matches the colourscheme)
- Ask your SEO how you should format your product titles, categories and ask for pointers on how to write effective descriptions
- Populate the site with information
- Ask the SEO to promote it.
- Total cost (est) £100 plus SEO fees.
- Then working with the SEO begin writing about your products from a non commercial viewpoint
- The SEO should begin building links and making changes to the site to make it more search friendly
- Make money
From this point on the plan should be:
- Listen to the customers, find out what features they require
- Look at your business rpocesses and work out what systems could be created to simplify/automate time consuming business tasks
- Reinvest in hiring a designer to change the theme and branding with guidance from the SEO
- Make more money
- Repeat
You can even read the FREE online book Getting Real by online application developers 37 Signals which gives you an idea as to how theyve built and managed successful websites without the masisve overhead and complicated initial featureset.
Wow that’s a really good guide for anyone starting a business. It is definitely worth getting the site running for as cheap as possible first as if your site doesn’t do well then you haven’t spent loads of money on it. Think of it more as a test run to see if your site works and to see if the market is there for your product.