06/30/00

Prices: Please note that these are the approximate prices at the time of this writing and are subject to change. I can not quote prices for companies other than myself. Please contact the individual companies for quotations. This is simply to give you an approximate idea of what you are looking at.

If all of the below seems to complicated you can just give me an idea of what you want to spend on a web site and I can suggest solution. Much of it depends on of course how much you want to have to learn about the particular software and systems. The example below is what I have seen to be a good middle of the road option and allows you growth and versatility with the lowest amount of monthly charges and ease of administration.

Here is a link that will show you the basics of posting a standard web page.
http://www.camalott.com/html/index.html . Camalott was also my ISP for many years and if you are in Abilene I would recommend checking them out

There are tons of options when it comes to an online store but the first thing that you will need is to register the domain name, once again there are options but the places to register it are all about the same.
http://www.networksolutions.com/
the above is the main one.
This is about $35 per year

The next step is finding a site that will host your pages , this is so you don't have to run a web server and the usually expensive connection (although DSL and some other connections would work to a point). These are 2 of the better places I have tried and use. The main difference was how they let me connect and how much hard drive space they give me for the pages. Both of these sites have other plans too.
http://www.site-works.com/ 100mb and about $25 monthly, recommended for an e-commerce site
http://www.1-host.com/ 10mb and about $12 a month. recommended for a standard site

Now that there is a name to go to and a place where it's hosted comes the site itself. The first thing to consider is what you will be doing with it . If you want to accept credit cards and have it process the shipping amounts and store the credit cards numbers for secure access by you later on. There are many many ways to do it. The link below is one I have started for a sample. Its free with my site hosting deal (and would come with yours too) at 1-host.com and could be quite hard to use ,not recommended for entry level persons.
http://www.abilenetexas.net/MyStore/

Another alternative is
http://mountain-net.com/ recommended
They provide ®Webcart software. I set up the webcart software from this company and took about 20 hours to configure it, build the pages, make a simple graphic or two and then all the scanning and entering part numbers took place afterwards.
http://www.computerpipeline.com/
I would recommend it since it lets you do everything through your browser as well as the older but sometimes better file transfer method and telnet.

The method above of hosting a site allows you full control over almost every aspect of your web site versus some of the other ways of doing this. You also own the right to use the software for life and custom programs can be written and such. There are new E-commerce places every day though and might be worth looking at if you don’t mind reading through them. Below is another example of a place that take care of almost everything for you, but usually are not nearly as flexible.
http://store.yahoo.com/

The most obvious problem with e-commerce software is the shipping and how you want to charge for it. You usually get per weight, dollar value or quantity shipping charging ability and you get into problems like dimensional weights and quantity based overcharging even with the better ones.

You could always charge for the shipping afterwards or have a flat rate. I believe most shoppers want to see a total dollar amount before giving their credit card out over the internet and averaging the shipping costs might not be feasable. This would be a much less expensive alternative though since most of the software is free and it would only take me slightly longer to configure.

Mainly what I would do for you with any of the methods is to guide you through the registration and site hosting process then after the site is more or less up, configure, build, customize the web site, begin the promotion process, show you how to get better results, show you how to connect to it, add product, get orders and answer any questions you might have. Ideally you can become completely independent in running the site once we are done.

Any payments would go directly to the individual companies. This is allowing for about 10 hours on my part as needed.


$35 yearly for domain name
$25 monthly for site hosting
$649 one time for webcart software purchase
$800 for my services
(325) 675-6595