Help Needed On Setting Up My Own Website.

[bucklt]

Am looking at setting up my own website - for business purposes i.e sell products from Asia - to customers worldwide.

In order to get a 'feel' for what will be involved, can someone recommend some websites / magazine articles (available on WWW) can I can read before starting the actual process.

At present interested in:

Purchasing a domain name?

Creating website itself - packages / architecture (free?)

Arranging payments via 3rd party (they do everything) and take a % of each transaction

Getting site uploaded

Thanks in anticipation,

Tony

p.s feel free to contact me directly - if you wish

[GmB]

An ecommerce website is not so easy to set up if you are not expert. There are some opensource platforms like Http://www.oscommerce.com/ or Http://www.zen-cart.com but you will need to customize them for your needs.

Let me know if you need help

[monty]

Some parts are easy, other parts are almost impossible for the untrained.

* Buying domain: easy, go to www.godaddy.com or any other budget registrar. Choose your domain name wise.

* Getting a webhost: easy, don't host with the same company where you bought your domain. Saves you heaps of hassles if you ever want to change hosts.

*Arranging payment gateway: easy, depends a little how and where you want to retrieve the funds. Paypal is too expensive when getting your funds transferred to a Thai bank account. More practical if you officially still live in the US or the UK and can withdraw the funds to your bank accounts over there. However be carefull because Paypal is known to lock accounts including all the funds insade when they think something is wrong (i.e. use your US account from within Thailand etc)

Locally I use paysbuy, a local Thai outfit with local support staff, receive any payments into your bank accounts locally etc.

* Create the website: difficult, especially if you want to integrate your payment gateway into your online shop. IMO better to leave to professionals, at least for the initial set-up. Afterwards it's not very hard to introduce new products, change prices etc... Correct coding is also important to make your site appear in search engines!

[7robbie7]

i would really advise you to use Http://www.zen-cart.com

they are straight forward

[bucklt]

An ecommerce website is not so easy to set up if you are not expert. There are some opensource platforms like Http://www.oscommerce.com/ or Http://www.zen-cart.com but you will need to customize them for your needs.

Let me know if you need help

Two excellent links!

Many thanks GmB.

Tony

[bucklt]

Some parts are easy, other parts are almost impossible for the untrained.

* Buying domain: easy, go to www.godaddy.com or any other budget registrar. Choose your domain name wise.

* Getting a webhost: easy, don't host with the same company where you bought your domain. Saves you heaps of hassles if you ever want to change hosts.

*Arranging payment gateway: easy, depends a little how and where you want to retrieve the funds. Paypal is too expensive when getting your funds transferred to a Thai bank account. More practical if you officially still live in the US or the UK and can withdraw the funds to your bank accounts over there. However be carefull because Paypal is known to lock accounts including all the funds insade when they think something is wrong (i.e. use your US account from within Thailand etc)

Locally I use paysbuy, a local Thai outfit with local support staff, receive any payments into your bank accounts locally etc.

* Create the website: difficult, especially if you want to integrate your payment gateway into your online shop. IMO better to leave to professionals, at least for the initial set-up. Afterwards it's not very hard to introduce new products, change prices etc... Correct coding is also important to make your site appear in search engines!

Monty,

Thank you for mentioning all those points.

Summary as follows:

1. GODADDY seems to be the right kind of people to buy domain names from.

Query; want to buy domain name ending in .ASIA - are they available yet?

2. 'Don't host with same company' - noted!

3. All funds to my bank account in UK.

Is GATEWAY still ok for that scenario? (have heard mixed reports about PAYPAL?)

4.Agree with using professional help - during initial set up.

Tony

[klikster]

Am looking at setting up my own website - for business purposes i.e sell products from Asia - to customers worldwide.

In order to get a 'feel' for what will be involved, can someone recommend some websites / magazine articles (available on WWW) can I can read before starting the actual process.

At present interested in:

Purchasing a domain name?

Creating website itself - packages / architecture (free?)

Arranging payments via 3rd party (they do everything) and take a % of each transaction

Getting site uploaded

Thanks in anticipation,

Tony

p.s feel free to contact me directly - if you wish

- Start thinking about a great brandable domain name. But don't buy until you find the right one.

Namecheap is the registrar I use

-Start reading the good webmaster forums

Webmasterworld

Sitepoint

Datapoint

- Start reading about web hosting

Webhostingtalk .. all about the good and the bad with some tutorials available.

Join the forums and read, read and read some more. Read about SEO, CSS, front ends, back ends, scripts, databases, PHP, javascript, JAVA, RUBY, Adwords, Affiliate Marketing, PPC, SEM .. well, prety much every topic.

Don't start asking questions on those forums until you know enough to ask good questions. If you ask too broad a question, like, "How do I set up my own website," you won't get very good answers. It would be like someone coming into TV and posting a message like, "Tell me about visas for Thailand."

When things start making sense to you, ask yourself if you're willing to make the effort. It ain't easy. If you are, go to the next level. If you have prepared properly, you will know how to start researching at that level. If you haven't learned, go back to square one and start again.

Beware of ebook offers to make millions and SEO guarantees. If you have a pile of cash, you can get someone to set up a site for you .. you can hire top copywriters to write sales pitches .. you can throw money at Adwords ..

.. and you may well end up with a much smaller pile of cash.

Edited February 4, 2008 by klikster

[dsys]

Am looking at setting up my own website - for business purposes i.e sell products from Asia - to customers worldwide.

In order to get a 'feel' for what will be involved, can someone recommend some websites / magazine articles (available on WWW) can I can read before starting the actual process.

At present interested in:

Purchasing a domain name?

Creating website itself - packages / architecture (free?)

Arranging payments via 3rd party (they do everything) and take a % of each transaction

Getting site uploaded

Thanks in anticipation,

Tony

p.s feel free to contact me directly - if you wish

- Start thinking about a great brandable domain name. But don't buy until you find the right one.

Namecheap is the registrar I use

-Start reading the good webmaster forums

Webmasterworld

Sitepoint

Datapoint

- Start reading about web hosting

Webhostingtalk .. all about the good and the bad with some tutorials available.

Join the forums and read, read and read some more. Read about SEO, CSS, front ends, back ends, scripts, databases, PHP, javascript, JAVA, RUBY, Adwords, Affiliate Marketing, PPC, SEM .. well, prety much every topic.

Don't start asking questions on those forums until you know enough to ask good questions. If you ask too broad a question, like, "How do I set up my own website," you won't get very good answers. It would be like someone coming into TV and posting a message like, "Tell me about visas for Thailand."

When things start making sense to you, ask yourself if you're willing to make the effort. It ain't easy. If you are, go to the next level. If you have prepared properly, you will know how to start researching at that level. If you haven't learned, go back to square one and start again.

Beware of ebook offers to make millions and SEO guarantees. If you have a pile of cash, you can get someone to set up a site for you .. you can hire top copywriters to write sales pitches .. you can throw money at Adwords ..

.. and you may well end up with a much smaller pile of cash.

Great advice above. I would add to it a little:

Start thinking about a great brandable domain name. But don't buy until you find the right one.

If you are serious about this you need to think about how you are going to protect that brand you should really purchase a few domains to stop others theiving your traffic. Had this done to me and its not nice.

example

www.london-widget.com

www.londonwidget.com

www.londonwidgets.com etc

Of course if you are really clever you could do this to a competitor but that would be unethical.

For a real life example see newsbbc.co.uk and news.bbc.co.uk

[klikster]

Great advice above. I would add to it a little:

Start thinking about a great brandable domain name. But don't buy until you find the right one.

If you are serious about this you need to think about how you are going to protect that brand you should really purchase a few domains to stop others theiving your traffic. Had this done to me and its not nice.

example

www.london-widget.com

www.londonwidget.com

www.londonwidgets.com etc

Yes, absolutely.

If someone is really serious and finds a good brandable domain, buy all the TLD (Top Level Domains = .com . net .org and, depending on your market, consider .us and .co.uk) and the hyphenated versions as well. Under $10 each/yr.

[bucklt]

Great advice above. I would add to it a little:

Start thinking about a great brandable domain name. But don't buy until you find the right one.

If you are serious about this you need to think about how you are going to protect that brand you should really purchase a few domains to stop others theiving your traffic. Had this done to me and its not nice.

example

www.london-widget.com

www.londonwidget.com

www.londonwidgets.com etc

Yes, absolutely.

If someone is really serious and finds a good brandable domain, buy all the TLD (Top Level Domains = .com . net .org and, depending on your market, consider .us and .co.uk) and the hyphenated versions as well. Under $10 each/yr.

I never considered that particular scenario i.e someone trying to compete with me by using Domain Name of similar meaning.

Thanks for the warning.

Tony

[thaiclan]

Check out 3ix.com they are really easy to use and the cheapest hosting Ive found. You can also set up loads of free stuff like forums and message boards plus free CGI scripting etc.

I have 4 sites with them and cannot fault them at all

[cafes]

Buy domain name with namecheap.com and host with godaddy.com AVOID 3ix.org at all costs!!!!!!

I am pretty sure that 3ix.org and 3ix.com are the same company. Whatever you do avoid those bozos as they'll promise you the world and do not deliver.

Do a search on Thai Visa and there will be dozens of threads/discussions about them. All of those threads are negative. A friend of mine got robbed off his money. They took his money and he never heard from them again and this after emailing them over a dozen times and submitting dozens of tickets.....

Edited February 5, 2008 by cafes

[Richard-BKK]

What most people forget to advice or tell to newbies who want to start a website is that building, as hard as it maybe looks is possible the easiest part. Getting your website found and attract the necessary visitors to make a web-business work is the hard part.

For 3ix.org I read all the complains in the past about them, and sure they as all seems to promise to make web-hosting easy... the reality is that nothing is that easy, otherwise we all had popular websites... I find that if you know enough about hosting and did your home work, you find that 3ix.org is a cheap and good hosting provider to start. I agree that registering your domain at godaddy or 1and1.com is a better idea then using your domain idea with 3ix.org even if they give you a free domain name. As they never going to give you domain control.

It is important that starting website owners will understand that a web host is nothing more the renting a PO-box at the local post office, asking your local post office to get more mail in your PO-box will also highly not result into what you would like..... Similar to the boys at 3ix.org....

And there is always the option for dare devils who like to do things them self, same like me, I also host a multitude of websites direct at hostdime, hostdime is the datacenter used by 3ix.org, and if you can talk technical enough you probably can talk direct to hostdime.com, but remember it is best to have a filter between you and a datacenter, as they are quick to cancel accounts or otherwise react harsh to mispronounced problems.

P.S. I host at 3ix.org anout 7 domains, and myself at hostdime 19 domains and at other datacenters about 40 domains

Edited February 5, 2008 by Richard-BKK

[thaiclan]

I have 4 sites hosted by 3ix and when I did my first one I was a complete newbie. They offered 24 hour "live chat" support which was invaluable. The domain name is in my name for 5 years..... so I don't understand how they could take that back??

The biggest "perk" I think 3ix offers is all the OS stuff that you can alter to give it your own look (colours etc).

Of course with so many customers there are bound to be complaints (and people complain a lot more than praise), but in my experience multiplied by 4 I have no complaints whatsoever.

Incidentally a much larger web-business that I launched I tried to use a web design company based in Singapore. They were expensive and I assumed therefore very good however less than halfway through the project I had to cancel the work due to shoddy and unprofessional design and technical work. I reverted back to 3 ix and I'm extremely happy (especially the forum which was free or $1400 with the design company!).

As for online advertising check out a piece of software called "Web Position Gold". It gets rated the best software to promote your company using Google and Yahoo search engines. It helps you to write the script using keywords that will allow your site to be picked up frequently by the spiders and raise your position in the search engine lists. 150baht from Tukcom

[cafes]

A friend deposited 700 Baht into 3ix's bank account. He never heard from them again. You seem to have had a good experience with these tossers. Most have not. There is more negative feedback on the net about 3ix than positive. This is fact. Dozens of Thai Visa members will advise against 3ix only a minoirty will endorse them.

To the Original Poster:

Enter 3ix into that small box on the bottom left and hit "search topic" and you will see for yourself.

[thaiclan]

Fair comment. And definitely read the complaints. But keep in mind that when someone receives a good or acceptable level of service they simply do not post about it. Hey look at me I never have until now! lol

[A_Traveller]

Re 3ix, the position seems to me that at one time they had an effective presence in Thailand, {pay by ATM etc.} but this came off the rails leaving people disgruntled.

The service from them is OK, but I'm not entirely sure its the right choice for those who have limited experience.

Regards

[klikster]

As for online advertising check out a piece of software called "Web Position Gold". It gets rated the best software to promote your company using Google and Yahoo search engines. It helps you to write the script using keywords that will allow your site to be picked up frequently by the spiders and raise your position in the search engine lists. 150baht from Tukcom

I have read in a number of forums that the excessive use of WPG got folks a penalty from Google. Learning, and staying current with SEO is best for a site with planned longevity.

@I agree 300% with the post talking about getting traffic being harder than site building and deployment.

@Hosting: Flaky hosts oven overpromise bandwidth, the drop you like a hot rock when you exceed their unstated limits. You will learn 20x more about hosting over at Webhostingtalk than on TV. Some of those guys are brutal. It's always better to pay a bit more .. and it doesn't need to be a lot more .. and get better security and service.

Host in the same country where you expect to do the most business. *

Just imagine you have a brand new site up, database, PPC campaign running, etc .. and then the server goes down .. or even worse, a disk crashes or the whole data center goes down. They WILL tell you that you are responsible for offsite backups. And if you're a noob, or even tech challenged, do you want to be fiddling with an RSYNC script?

It has always amazed me that someone will set up a $x,000 site on a $3.98/mo hosting account.

*country related .. if most of your business will come from the UK, register a *.co.uk domain and use that one. It should come a little higher in search results in the data center for that country.

[dsys]

Promotion/Conversion (some notes) Might not mean to much to you at the moment

Easy wins:

1. Learn how to build a site first, learn how it all hangs together. This will help you understand the whole search engine thing.

2. KEYWORDS KEYWORDS KEYWORDS. I cant shout it loud enough. Everything you do must be based atound a tight set of interlinked keywords. No more than three targeted works per page. Use wordtracker and review your logfile weekly.

3. Use the "long tail deep page rule". That is keywords that are competative eg "london widgets" should be on the main page. Keyphrases like " cheap green london widgets" shud be deeper in your directory structure.

4. Structure your pages correctly using standards - while this may not directly affect your rankings it will help spiders read your pages.

5. Using onion skin design can help you target directly to spiders while maintaining your cool designs for users. For an example go to yahoo and turn off css and java.

6. Do NOT be a link hound. Dont go out and grap every and any link you can find. You can get a top ten page in a reasonably compeative keyword with only a "few" well chosen links.

7. Dont write your copy for your keywords, it wont convert well. If you are no good at writing copy use a professional, try a freelancer. google "getafreelancer"

8. Get THE BEST stats package you can afford, dont use webstats if you are serious use logfile analysis. Once you have made your decision about the software DONT change it. KEEP your logfiles as long as you can.

9. dont use door way pages that have no corridor or product landing.

10 Join hacker safe if you can afford it.

Not so easy wins

1. Get one way links

2. A/B test, learn about it use it

3. Learn adwords and use it properly (not as easy as it appears) see adgooroo.com

4. Monitor how long people are on your site, try to increase this, offer reviews, forums etc to get people coming back.

Questionable tactics

1. Use revirew sites to attack your competitors markets/products. Have 10-15 names that are respected on forums that will push your products. google guerilla marketing

2. Create a widget or free ebook or something that will be distributed on the net to promote your site

3. Social sites, get some profiles, you can even rent them and get people to promote your product.

Remember that once you people to your site you have to convert them to sales - learn how to do this, learn how to monitor it, learn how to improve it

Number one in goole with 0% conversions is worse than number 30 with 100% conversions

<flame on>

[dsys]

just a few more things: If I were to do it all again and was just starting out here is the order i would learn things in

1. wed site usability - design for the user not the browser.

2. html/css, standards based design.

3. basic seo - keywords, onpage design, off page design (keyword linking), copy writing

4. a/b testing

5. conversion testing

6. database design

7. php mysql or vb/mssql

8. advanced seo - spider traps, mininets, collab site sharing, site renting and push circles

9. adwords - time based listings, 4 quad analysis and location/conversion testing

10. More advanced marketing - Social networking, forum marketing, viral marketing etc.

some essential tools I use:

Dreamweaver

Photoshop

VMWare workstation

WS_FTP Pro

notepad

Visual Studio

[thaiclan]

Great advise DSYS - just this type of thorough reply that makes forums like these worth their weight in Gold. You're awesome

[klikster]

Promotion/Conversion (some notes) Might not mean to much to you at the moment

Easy wins:

1. Learn how to build a site first, learn how it all hangs together. This will help you understand the whole search engine thing.

2. KEYWORDS KEYWORDS KEYWORDS. I cant shout it loud enough. Everything you do must be based atound a tight set of interlinked keywords. No more than three targeted works per page. Use wordtracker and review your logfile weekly.

3. Use the "long tail deep page rule". That is keywords that are competative eg "london widgets" should be on the main page. Keyphrases like " cheap green london widgets" shud be deeper in your directory structure.

4. Structure your pages correctly using standards - while this may not directly affect your rankings it will help spiders read your pages.

5. Using onion skin design can help you target directly to spiders while maintaining your cool designs for users. For an example go to yahoo and turn off css and java.

6. Do NOT be a link hound. Dont go out and grap every and any link you can find. You can get a top ten page in a reasonably compeative keyword with only a "few" well chosen links.

7. Dont write your copy for your keywords, it wont convert well. If you are no good at writing copy use a professional, try a freelancer. google "getafreelancer"

8. Get THE BEST stats package you can afford, dont use webstats if you are serious use logfile analysis. Once you have made your decision about the software DONT change it. KEEP your logfiles as long as you can.

9. dont use door way pages that have no corridor or product landing.

10 Join hacker safe if you can afford it.

Not so easy wins

1. Get one way links

2. A/B test, learn about it use it

3. Learn adwords and use it properly (not as easy as it appears) see adgooroo.com

4. Monitor how long people are on your site, try to increase this, offer reviews, forums etc to get people coming back.

Questionable tactics

1. Use revirew sites to attack your competitors markets/products. Have 10-15 names that are respected on forums that will push your products. google guerilla marketing

2. Create a widget or free ebook or something that will be distributed on the net to promote your site

3. Social sites, get some profiles, you can even rent them and get people to promote your product.

Remember that once you people to your site you have to convert them to sales - learn how to do this, learn how to monitor it, learn how to improve it

Number one in goole with 0% conversions is worse than number 30 with 100% conversions

<flame on>

Nothing in your post deserves a flame.

This is information that is necessary .. and critical for running a successful website. I think some of the factors are for an ecommerce site .. and I wish I knew more about them (my sites are content driven with a dash of affiliate). I do understand about promotion and conversion, but I would guess that achieving high p&c it is the holy grail.

Thanks, dsys.