With some essential basics of e-commerce site design out of the way, you're ready to move on to the process of designing and creating your e-commerce site.

Follow up:

The first thing to say is that unless you are very proficient in HTML coding and design, building your site from scratch is probably not something you want to get involved in. Doing things this way is going to be a long and involved process, one that is likely to prove frustrating and difficult.

If the time that it is taking to do the job does not dissuade you from pursuing your goal, the frustrations that you suffer on the road to doing so may very well blow your e-commerce idea out of the water before it is ever even launched!

It is far easier and quicker to put together a list of what you want your site to do, how many pages you want it to have in the beginning with a list of products that you want to sell, so that you can submit the whole thing to a professional website designer. Having a site designed from scratch should not cost more than a couple of hundred dollars, which is money extremely well spent, because it frees you up to do things that are more likely to make money for your business.

An alternative would be to use a website template which you would then need to modify and alter to suit your own requirements. Doing this is not as difficult or time-consuming as designing the whole thing from scratch. Furthermore, as long as you have an easy to use, visual WYSIWYG ('What you see is what you get') HTML editor like the free Kompozer, you should be able to edit the template itself, which saves the design fee.

There are dozens of places where you can find free templates, starting within the cpanel of your Hostgator web hosting account (this will probably also apply to any other web host who uses a cpanel, but as every individual host is different, you would need to check). When you open the cpanel (= "control panel"), it will look something like this:

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