e-commerce website design?
i’d like to create an e-commerce website. i know what i want it to look like and have designed a few pages in illustrator. how do i translate my design into a functional e-commerce website? what’s the easiest way to do this?
i don’t want to use templates you can buy or get for free.
thanks!
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Without template, you have to design everything yourself, by hand, or using an IDE (ie Dreamweaver).
What illustrator gave you is an IMAGE on HOW your website should look when it is completed, nothing else!
In other words, this is where the hard work starts…
You need first to "cut" your image into small areas (called slicing), so each area has its own functionality. ie: you have buttons: each button is a clickable area, and each leads to a function of another page.
If you want, I’ll give you a starting point: visit http://www.web2coders.com, "portfolio", "lingerie store": it is a small e-commerce for clothes, with database and custom admin. Send me your emain and I’ll send you the basic code: that will be your starting point. (Your server must be LAMP: Linux/unix, Apache, Mysql and Php)
Easiest short term or long term? Because, long term, if you don’t know how to develop e-commerce sites, regardless of your design, it’s going to come back to bite you, when someone hacks into a site you designed, steals credit card numbers, and you or your client are out a few million dollars.
And you don’t learn things like that by asking questions on Yahoo.
As you may know a domain name is just a name, not a real website. If you are going to create your website: 1- Buy a domain name. A domain name is a name you want to call your website. To get a domain name, you have to pay an annual fee to a registrar for the right to use that name. 2- Buy a web hosting service to provide your online space and enable you to get your website online at your purchased domain name.
To get further information take a look at: http://www.threehosts.com/build
You need a web hosting service which supports online payments like, Master Card, Visa & PayPal. It is very important that your service be uptime. It means that you can access your account whenever you want to update your web pages, and your visitors can view your website whenever they type your website address. If your hosting service is not uptime it is real hell!
If you want to start your website I recommend purchase your domain and hosting together. In this way it is possible to get your domain for free. Some hosting services offer this gift today.
If you want to run a successful e-commerce you must choose a reliable web hosting service. The security of your business directly depends on the security of your hosting service. (Hacker safe)
Take a look at: http://www.threehosts.com/business
There you can reach the three reputable companies that are leaders in the E-commerce web hosting industry. They fulfill all your requirements to sell online. By using each of them, everything you need for your business website is provided in one eCommerce Hosting Package.
Good Luck!