Starting your own website?

In my mind, this would be the perfect scenario:

1) Don't do it yourself, unless you have the experience and can put in 90+ hours a week. Even if you do know how, you'll be better off focusing on the business and not coding bugs.

2) Hire smart, ambitious, college students who have experience in designing an e-commerce site. Try to get a co-op deal where they get college credit instead of pay, or pay them dirt cheap. If you plan on selling items off the web site, see if you can arrange a deal whereby the site developers get x% of all internet deals as part or all of their pay. Gives them incentive to build a great site that gets results. Talk to local college professors/department heads for student/internship recommendations. Formalize it as much as possible/practical so that they take it as a serious commitment/job. Get a 3 or more person team assigned so that your internet business is not dependent on any one person. The pre-packaged e-commerce software packages are outrageously expensive for a small business, so perhaps your college team has access to academic licensing that could be used for your business.

3) Hosting facilities/costs/services range the gamut depending on scalability (very low in your case), security (credit cards, customer info need high security), redundancy/fault tolerance/availability (low in your case), and software/server requirements (dependent on e-commerce architecture/design). CC processing can be handled by 3rd party hosting/processing that relieves you of a lot of risk/liability.

4) As part of your college team, try and get someone dedicated as the project lead who can help direct team members to focus on certain tasks and work with you on coordinating requirements, specs, implementation plan, etc.

I know it sounds like a lot, but an effective e-commerce site is not a small undertaking!

Good Luck!

They weren't from the Motorcycle Mechanics Institute were they? ;)

goto freeservers.com and pick free site it will have a .4t or .8m before the .com. like for example yourbusiness.4t.com but its free!

You can register a domain name starting at $9 /year, and you can get a yahoo shop for $50 " first month free ". A yahoo shop is very easy to set up and they have lots of online help. Heck they even handle credit card payments for you.

I sent you a PM bundy.

Bunster, I'd start small. No need to build a full-on eCommerce site. One of my friends is a Pro ASP consultant who'd probably be glad to answer you questions. He does hosting as well, much cheaper than you'd find commercially.

FrontPage or Dreamweaver.
Get it built and I can help you get it ranked.
They gotta find it or it's just fodder in a sea of more fodder.

I know there are many who will build a fabulous site for you, but you may want to invest o bit of your own midnight oil first. You may surprize yourself if using the right tools.

Dreamweaver is by far the better of the two I mentioned, however FrontPage has some great features and interacts with lots of good stuff.

I do things on the cheap....very cheap....I'm getting rankings others pay dearly for.

One more thing....PayPal!