The first step you need to take is building a quality web page, and getting traffic to it. Search engines rank you on information, key words, quality of pages, and whole handful of other factors. You want a webpage to look good (after all, if you look unprofessional, customers will leave), but don't go over the tope or search engines will not be able to find you.
Register a domain. This should be your first step, you can do this by yearly contracts at through many different providers.
Secure hosting. When you secure hosting make sure you have everything you need, upgrading a hosting account can be more expensive than buying what you need upfront. Will you need support for scripting and databases? MySQL? PHP? PERL? Others? If you plan to run your store on your own site, then the answer is yes.
Design a Website. Now that you have your domain and hosting, you need to design a website. You have the option of building a site or having a professional design your site. Keep in mind when making a decision that you want your site to be more than just an eye-catching graphic and a store blurb. To get traffic you need to build a page consciously, with separate meta tags, infused keywords, html headings, CSS integrated to minimize clutter, original content. A web professional can help you to build a site that does more than just fill space—it builds traffic to your business! A few factors to keep in mind:
- how long will you spend on your website? (Is it actually cheaper for you to hire a professional than take time away from your business?)
- does your website have effective alt tags, keywords, meta tags, and headings
- Does your website look attractive? Remember graphics for the web and for print are different, scanned graphics or photos may take a long time to load or appear blurry without editting in a graphics program.
When you build your store, you need to make some key decisions. Firstly, will you host your store or will you have another company host your store. Game Design Center offers online store hosting on your own domain (with domain name registration service) as well as at ours for FREE.
- what type of items are in your store & how many items are in your store,
- what is your budget & what do you expect for the future,
- what type of payment would you like to accept (paypal? credit cards? cash?)
The simplest and eisiest way of starting to accept payments is through PayPal. If you only want to accept donations, sell single items, or are just trying out selling online, PayPal provides a quick and cheap program. The downside is that your users must go through PayPal, which some users will not do. For larger stores you should accept credit card.
If your store is larger, you will want to accept credit cards. To do this you will need a merchant account and a payment gateway that may be hosted on or off your site. To reduce liability, many service such as PayPal accept credit card payments from what appears to be your site even though it is actually hosted at PayPal. If you choose to handle credit cards on your own site beware that you may be held liable if information is stolen or corrupted. Authorize.net and 2checkout.com provide merchant solutions to help you set up your store that are easily integrated with most common shopping carts.
Take quality photos and upload your items to your store. Web photos are best in .jpg format at 72 dpi resolution, which keeps your page loading quickly and images appearing crisp. Quality photos will sell your items, so try to get the best quality shots you are able to find. Remember, this is all the customer will see of your items—they can't pick up and touch like they would in a brick and mortar store, so you need to use photos increase your chance of impulse buys. This helps build traffic and generate sales for your store! For clipart, or other art you may need for your sites, a number of websites provided paid or free subscriptions, such as Clipart.com. For more graphics tutorials see Webclipart.com. Game Design Center offers custom graphics solutions, custom clipart images, photos of your items, and more to our customers.
Game Design Center offers custom packages to help build your website, store, forum and more. A forum can generate countless store visitors, and it ensures that your existing customers are returning to your website to see new products and special promotions. Our designs are custom, with high quality
Our designs are custom, with high quality, professionally designed logos and graphics. The stores we build are unique to our customers, and start at only $200 for a basic website, and only $400 for basic store implementation. Because we have designers, graphic artists, and web developers on staff, we are able to meet your needs for customizations (individually priced). We offer photography services for your products, and can help you go from zero to great selling store.
Many other sites offer packages that help you to get online and start selling right away through automated systems. The down side to this is, if you have little technical experience with the web your site may look simply unprofessional and/or be difficult to update or manage. If you are interested in quickly registering domain names or have the advanced technical skills to set up your own site EIS Data has great deals to help you get started. Note that (similar to ebay for you ebay-ers out there, there will be fees per item and item limits). These offers are not compatible with Game Design Center stores. Please wait to register your domain name with us to recieve package specials. If you decide at a later date to switch your service to Game Design Center from any other hosting service, you will recieve up to six months FREE of additional hosting-- that way you're not losing any money when you change service!
Maintain, Promote, and Grow your website. We are there with our customers every step of the way to help them to grow and maintain their websites. For as little as $20 per month we provide backup support—in case of emergency or data loss, we will have a backup copy of your files in our records. We offer custom illustrations from graphics to paintings for both your website and printed material for production. We encourage you to contact us via email to learn more about how we can help you to develop a successful website and online store.
