Web design?

[Hawkmoon]

I don't know if anyone here can help, but I am in need of assistance ... or, at least, guidance.

My wife has been talking for several years about starting a small, home-based Internet business to sell crafts products from her home country. At least two years ago she started working with her (adult) son's ex-girlfriend in said country to design a web site for her. A year later, we had ... not a web site, but a logo.

About a year ago we hosted a visit from a friend of the adult son and another gent who is a friend of the friend. Turned out the friend of the friend is a web designer, so my wife then asked him to take over creating a web site for her. We now have a web site design that looks lovely ... but doesn't work. First, even though I have twice sent him the PayPal instructions (in Spanish) on how to put the PayPal checkout links into the web site ... he still can't figure it out. Beyond that, what he didn't do is make any provision for my wife (which means me) to maintain the site. The things she'll be selling are typically one-of-a-kind items. When an item sells, we need to be able to remove it from the site, quickly and easily. And she (we) need to be able to add new items to the site as she brings in new product.

I am at the point of giving up on having the site developed in the native country. It makes no sense for a company that will be operating in the U.S. and selling primarily (if not entirely) to a U.S. clientele to be fooling around with web designers on another continent who don't speak English. But ... I don't know anything at all about web design and/or HTML coding. If any of you are knowledgeable in this area, how can I get a leg up on creating a functional web site that will allow us to handle on-line sales? It doesn't have to be "beautiful" -- just clean and professional looking.

Are there any affordable web design programs that will allow me to do this? Or, better yet, and freeware programs?

TIA

[Monkeyleg]

You could get a real designer to fix the flaws. There's software out there, but getting certain things to work across all operating systems and browsers is a headache.

If everything else works on the site, you could learn how to make changes such as updating products or product availability yourself.

Adding the right code for PayPal isn't difficult.

[cordex]

There are a number of open source programs that do this kind of thing.  Most of them would be capable of handling what you want to do out of the box, although they may take some time to manage if she sells a lot of one-off products.

I've used OpenCart and Magento, although either is probably overkill for your needs.

[TechMan]

What about an etsy presence?

[Hawkmoon]

What about an etsy presence?

A WHAT?

It appears you gentlemen may have me confused with someone who knows something about computers and programming. I can use commercial programs like MS Office, but I haven't understood anything about how these mystical machines work since the demise of MS-DOS and batch file programming.

[RevDisk]

Etsy is a place that caters to selling mostly one-off artistic stuff. You'd use them for essentially web design, hosting and payment processing. Like Amazon, sorta. But they get a cut of the action.  $0.20 per item for 4 months, 3.5% of the sale if sold.


Otherwise, you'd be better off hiring a real web designer with ecommerce experience. I do that sort of thing, so do others here.

[Harold Tuttle]

etsy is the market place where housefraus shop for geegaws

www.etsy.com

why build a palace in the sticks when the customers are all at the mall?

shoveling a paypal link is simple coding, a 13 year old can do it.

etsy charges you a listing fee and a percentage of your sales,
but the cms is browser based and simple to keyword your listings

you can have a full operational site selling product in 20 minutes

[never_retreat]

Your best bet is to use one of the major cart suppliers. There software is usually very plug and play. They take care of all the hard stuff.
You add you graphics, txt, and product.

Big commerce, 3d cart, volusion(i'm using this one and don't recommend it, went down hill)