Hi All,
Starting off a small business soon in web design and loooking for some advice on a few things. Apologies for lumping all three questions in one.
1) Which e-commerce framework would you recommend? I've read good things about Zen-Cart. The main focus should be security and being very SEO friendly.
2) Besides templatemonster, can you recommend any good source of website skins, e-commerce templates?
3) What's the feeling on hosting reseller plans? Are they a good way to bring in more revenue? Can you recommend any good ones?
I'm sure I'll be posting many more questions for you in the future and maybe even helping out with a few answers eventually :-)
Thanks,
John

Before you choose your shopping cart you may want to look into how you are going to process the payments

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Well try and find some good templates first. Template Monster is a joke. Try and get some freelance designers on Sitepoint etc...

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1. Try ASP Shopping Cart Software | UK Designed Ecommerce Software - Standards compliant, SEO optimized, UK VAT and US State Tax support if you are any good at asp. It supports worldpay, paypal and realex.

2. Stay away from templates. Try a sitepoint contest for some good work at reasonable prices (Design Contests)

3. A good hosting reseller account can add some nice revenue to a small business. You could be turning over 5-20k per annum on hosting when it will only cost you about 1k. However, you will have to support all these customers so factor that in. Irish hosting Ireland, hosting ireland / web site hosting Ireland / domain registration, dedicated servers, colocation - Blacknight Solutions: Blacknight Solutions and Welcome to Ireland's largest Hosting Company - Hosting 365 have decent reseller plans amongst others.

Hope that helps

Dave

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David Behan
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Hi All,
Some great comments here so thanks for that. It's a big help.

Blacknight, my market will be Ireland and possibly the UK. PayPal is there but how many people in Ireland actually have an account? I'd prefer straight credit card processing but Realex's prices seem very expensive to me.

Babyboy, wasn't even aware of SitePoint. I take it the quality of work is better there? Will look into that.

David, thanks for the link. I was under the impression that PHP/Linux based carts were more secure than Windows based ones. I guess this is based on Windows being attached way more than Linux...or am I wrong? Is that a misconception? I had been looking at Zen-Cart and Oscommerce but not so sure now.
Thanks for your help,
John

I'd recommend paypal + offline payments until your volumes are big enough. You can then examine other options. Realex may seem expensive, but they aren't

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Heh - if you're starting a business in web design i really hope those templates are for your potential customers.

Try to get a good freelancer on board - and offer their design stuff with Hosting, and offer hosting with your design. It's hard to separate hosting from design especially if you have people who "just want a website" for their shop or something.