When starting an eCommerce website you should start with a product/service. What do you want to sell? Let’s say you want to sell plants. Great! Ok so now we have the product but who is going to sell it?

Now you need a brand. If you have an idea for a company/website name then you will need to register the domain name/s. We recommend 123-reg for domain name registration. Their prices are some of the lowest you will find and the DNS/Nameserver functions work flawlessly. This is what tells the domain where the website is hosted (we will get onto that later). So let’s say we want to call the website Beautiful Plants Direct. Now you will need a logo design and start getting a feel for fonts, colours and graphics.

So let’s say we want to call the website Beautiful Plants Direct. Now you will need a logo design and start getting a feel for fonts, colours and graphics. We will help with that by giving you 3 different logo designs based on your ideas and then revise 1 until you get the perfect logo.

The next step is the website design. This builds on the branding work we have completed. We will design the homepage and other key pages if required and revise that with you until you are happy. We will implement website design best practices such as navigation, headings and image examples. Once you are happy with the design the project moves onto coding.

Coding an eCommerce website starts with selecting a platform to run your eCommerce website on. These include WordPress, Magento which are both Opensource platforms. This means that 1000s of developers are working on them every day to release updates and security. We choose to work with these two platforms as they offer huge extendability with WordPress Plugins and Magento Extensions and can cater for eCommerce sites with a couple of products up to serval thousand.

Once the website is coded the integration and population phase starts. This is where we start uploading products, linking social media accounts, integrating payment gateways and setting up shipping methods. It it a good idea to start thinking about payment gateways and merchant accounts at the start of the project as these can take a few weeks to get approved by the banks. There are other options such as Stripe and Paypal which are much quicker to get setup however.