Setting up your own site

[Sunshine_Crafts]

Hi All,

I am currently looking into settin up my own site to offer advice and information on different activities as well as an internet shop to sell craft supplies. I would be interested in seeing peoples sites and knowing if you did them yourselves or paid for someone to do them for you as well as knowing peoples opinions on different packages and set ups that I coud use such as Mr Site, 123-reg etc.

I am a complete newbie to this and am happy to learn a new package if I need to but with so many out there to chose from it is confusing.

Thank-you in advance for your help on this subject.

[MrSwirl]

If it were me, I'd get someone in to do it - and I'm a computer programmer!

I haven't got time to design and build a site for ecommerce, when there are other things that can do it just as well, if not better - etsy, for example.

Mr. Site doesn't look that good to me, to be honest, and most hosting packages don't have that good software for building the site yourself - for example I looked at OS Commerce, which I could get up and running quickly, for free. However, the effort it took to get it rebranded etc. was just too much, so I gave up.

If you do pay someone to do it, get a few quotes first, and make sure that what ever method you choose for your site, you can make design and content changes quickly, easily and painlessly yourself rather than going back to someone else and having to pay them to list some new items / change some prices etc. etc.

[Bea]

There are more and more companies offering ecommerce solutions these days. There are a couple I know of to avoid. I'll PM you.
Bear in mind that if you have lots of products then you'll need someone who can support them. Make sure you know what you want, e.g. ability to send a newsletter was one of the reasons I went with who I went with.

Also if you want to receive payments other than paypal, you will need to get an internet merchant account. The last one I got took a month to set up completely!

[lakeland]

bidlocally new Auction website for Lancashire

Hi,

Just to let you know that you can set up your own store and sell for free on MOD EDIT - PLEASE READ THE POSTING RULES website - similar to Ebay but without the fees.

Anna