wordpress ecommerce solutio for online businessesIts taken a while but I’ve managed to come back to this series. I believe it is an excellent piece for anyone trying to set up online businesses. Hopefully I’ll be tidying it up real soon. I plan to do about three posts on it and put up a live demo, here.

Like i said in the ‘prequel’ to this post setting up online businesses may take a bit but generally any one can get through it. So what’s in store next ?

In this post I’ll go straight into what content management system to use and how to go through basic configurations. After this series I’m immediately starting one on how to find the products to resell at the cheapest prices, traffic generation and all of that. My goal is to ensure that a total newbie can set up online businesses as fast as possible.

The content management system I’ve selected is not a traditional one but it works real fine , its free, comes with a lot of easy to install and excellent plugins and you’re already familiar with it . Actually you’re looking at it right now. Its called wordpress and it can be downloaded here. Its actually designed for blogs but because of its features it would work excellently for an e-commerce site. As a matter of fact it will probably work much better than a generic CMS. I specifically have chosen this solution because its extremely easy to use.

Here are a few sample sites to give you an idea of what the sites for your online businesses will look like pretty soon.

Now that you’re ready to go on you will need certain things in place

  • Filezilla - for uploading and downloading content from your website ( we’ll need this to upload wordpress to your site if you’re not hosting with HostGator )
  • A web hosting account : Right now I’m tempted to run off and join an affiliate network on some hosting site and then send the bulk of you there and make some money but I won’t, the idea here is to be of some help, and I guess the adsense ads are bad enough. I’ll personally recommend HostGator, I’ve read a lot of good reviews and I’ve been around a bit, its a good deal. I also recommend HostGator because you can install wordpress directly from the control panel which makes this whole process much more easier ( can actually save you maybe an hour and a lot of stress ). I will not assume that you have used HostGator so the procedure will have steps for both situations.
  • Obviously you need a domain name, at most 2 words, no hyphens or numbers I’ve done a series on domain names for online businesses here , please read through it before selecting a domain name. If you already have a domain name you can still use it , there’s no problem.
  • You’ll also need to download these plugins for wordpress, I was actually thinking of putting the whole package together ie wordpress+plugins, and giving a direct download link from here, but I’m not too sure I’m allowed to do that so I wont just yet.The plugins are All-in-one-SEO and The E-commerce plugin. These are basically the plugins you’ll need.

So let’s get to setting up sites for your online businesses.

  1. If you’re on hostgator simply activate wordpress for your particular domain from your control panel, if you have any questions contact the help desk or send me an e mail (contacts page ) I’ll be glad to help you. If you aren’t using hostgator, simply download the wordpress zipped file to your computer, by using this link, unzip this file to a folder, then start up filezilla (Here’s a comprehensive guide to using filezilla), and upload the contents of the unzipped folder to your websites root or wherever on your website you intend to put the ecommerce site (it doesn’t necessarily have to be the root, you can put it into a folder so that to access it you’d type in www.yoursite.com/foldername/ ).
  2. Setup the database following the instruction in the readme.html file, if you’re using Hostgator this should be done for you automatically
  3. Next upload the unzipped versions of the plugins to the folder /wp-content/plugins/
  4. Then you can log into your wordpress installation ie your dashboard. To do this browse to http://www.yoursite.con/wp-admin/ and login
  5. Next click on the plugins link at the upper right hand corner, scroll down to the two plugins and click on the activate link to activate the plugin.

You’ve basically done the entire first stage, the second stage will involve tweaking parameters and doing stuff like that and then I’ll also get into setting the whole site up and getting ready to go live, I plan to put up a demo site here on the Online Businesses Blog. I’m sure it would have been a lot more easier for those with the automatic install but I don’t think its that difficult for those who did it normally. Next post is coming up real soon.