Where do I start e-commerce sites

Building a website is not something that is really cut and dry. There is a broad diversity of products and services that can help get your website where you want it or plainly intermingle you. It 'also significative that you make the right choices in push so you do not end up having to restructure the undivided website because of some enigma in layout contrive. The horizontal of duration investing invest neccessary for dominance in many of these software packages can alter a bit 'for a very significative aggregate. So I think it is important to be a leader in the "right" way to be sure not to waste time in the wrong areas, or learning a software that might not be as useful for you later on (* coughs * Frontpage * cough *.)

Where you start really depends on what you're thinking of trying to do, and how deep you dive in. For a moderately website look professional, clean, without a lot of automation or intensive animated graphics you can probably get a little ' basic knowledge of HTML, the ability of a good WYSIWYG editor, and a program for editting image. On the other hand, if you're someone who is trying to build something that would really impress the audience, then you might consider spending some 'greater time and developing some animation skills with a program like Macromedia Flash. I personally always spring for what I believe will bring the greatest amount of profit with minimal effort, so I usually end up spending all my time in deep dive with only my WYSIWYG HTML editor, and my image editor.

What is an editor "WYSIWYG"?

A (What You See Is What You Get) WYSIWYG HTML editor is what allows you to live with minimal knowledge of HTML. Yes, this means you do not know anything about HTML to have a decent looking website. When using a WYSIWYG editor it interprets what you're doing (inserting an image, for example) as a certain series of HTML tags with attributes, and does it for you ... So, what you see on screen is what you get. Instead of seeing a bunch of HTML code in text format, is mostly to see what actually appears in your browser once the site is active while you are doing. I recommend using the latest version of Dreamweaver - is known as one of the best HTML editors by general consensus. Dreamweaver's interface is very friendly, has a. Built in FTP client, and is specifically designed to be flexible enough to suit both the coder and the everyday amatuer webmaster

Image editing? What do I need?

Ok, let's be realistic: if you're going to make a professional web site * is * important is that you can do a little 'basic, decent looking graphics. There are a lot of graphics problems that can actually do the job, but what about power and flexibility goes I recommend Adobe Photoshop. Adobe Photoshop definitely takes some 'getting used to, but ultimately very rewarding. I ended up using my knowledge of Photoshop to make not only graphics for multiple sites, but also touched up portraits, made business cards, flyers and other advertising and online banners. In fact, I used it for everything except animation ... But it also comes with Adobe ImageReady, which is very good with animation. This software is amazing, and if you are going to learn any image editing software I recommend you start with Photoshop because of its widerange of overall ... utilities!

Allow me some sales!

He launched his new website which is obtained from knowledge of webmastering and image editing with a few new sales ... Sounds like a plan? Well, a great way to do that quickly is with pay-per-click advertising. BUT WAIT! This does not cost money? Well ... Yes, but with the tools that brought us some of the biggest pay-per-click advertisers out there we should be able to make an assessment of how much good we do, without much initial investment.

The big question behind pay-per-click advertising is not worth the money when you can simply get traffic from search engines dividend entitlement (otherwise known as organic traffic). After all, there are many companies out there that promise to help all the traffic you need through optimizing your site for organic search. The answer to this question is quite simple: profit is profit. Through conversion tracking tools, such as those offered by Yahoo! Search Marketing and Google Adwords anyone can calculate exactly what their profit is after cost of PPC advertising is removed. In my opinion, Google Adwords has the most user-friendly interface among the PPC advertisers. Google Adword interface makes it very easy to see which keywords are pulling in more sales, and that are not worth your advertising money.

Do not forget, however, that to make those conversions we're going to need a shopping cart! There are a lot of different software packages out there, you can use, but I used Mal E-Commerce shopping cart for a number of years with great success. Cart server is hosted on their machines which means that not only get away with not having to pay for the software itself, but result from having to buy an SSL security ticket too! Nothing is a better deal than free, eh?

Getting those sales leads you have built to buy!

Once you've had a few sales would probably be a good idea to start using some kind of lead management services. I recommend the use of autoresponders for this purpose. Autoresponders are, essentially, an application form, which allows you to strategically determine what you want to send each lead after a certain time alotted. For example, suppose someone visits your site and offer them a free newsletter. If you're selling an ebook on a very complicated subject, you might consider sending them only information on the most basic concepts at first to get them interested. Slowly but surely, you can turn those visitors who could have left your site and never came back for some revenue for real!

The autoresponders go, I recommend using Aweber. Their customer service is excellent (seriously, these guys really know their stuff!) And can be contacted at any time during the business day via online chat or by phone. They also offer tons of free information and guides on how to make the most of their services.