If you want to start an online business And I ask myself what to do. Well, there are two options: get a professional company to build your store for you and spend a lot of your hard-earned money or build it yourself.

These days, building a website isn’t that hard, there are plenty of community programs and tools out there that make the job easy, and best of all, they’re free. First, let’s first make a checklist of what you need, then I’ll explain each of the checklist items.

1. Domain name: the name of the website in the navigation bar www. your keywords here.com
2. Hosting space: the place where all the information of your site is stored.
3. The actual website: the codes, text, images that make up your site.
4. A payment gateway: ways to accept online payments like PayPal or credit card
5. Weather:)

Now, before we go into each of the above points, here is something important to note. Your site’s domain name plays an important role in search engine optimization. This is something I didn’t know when I built my first site, which led to a poor ranking on Google and therefore poor sales. You need to make sure your domain name contains keywords that best represent your products. I recommend seeking the advice of an SEO specialist before choosing your domain name.

Then let’s get started, where do i get a domain name? There are many domain registrars that offer domain names at good prices, for example Godaddy.com, netfirms.com and planetdomain.com to name just a few. Personally, so far I have been using Godaddy, which has quite fast and professional service. Once you have purchased your domain, you need to point it to your Hosting Space. This is done by editing the A or CNAME record in your domain settings. Most of the big registrars will help you point your domain, and it’s usually even quicker and easier if you get both the domain and the hosting space from the same company.

Not that you have your domain name, it’s time to choose a hosting company there are hundreds if not thousands of hosting companies. These are the important thoughts to keep in mind before choosing a hosting company.

• Where is the server located? If you host a website that targets an audience in Cyprus, for example, and you choose a host in the United States. Then you probably have slow Ping and the shopping experience on your site is slow and shoppers like fast sites.
• What kind of support and warranties come with the server? Is there a guaranteed uptime? Is there 24 hour support? What does the support include? Some of the Host Providers will pre-install the CMS (Content Management System) for you.
• And finally what is the cost per month. Some hosting companies offer shared hosting which is basically a physical server divided into many virtual servers with individual control. This solution is usually cheap and good for starting your first website.
• What operating system does the hosting company use? I personally recommend Linux, it’s very fast and reliable and I’ve had a great experience with it so far.

So now that you have your domain and hosting space, it’s time to choose the CMS or Content Management System.

What is a CMS? A CMS is one of the most important parts of your online store. The Content Management system has two sides, the front end and the back end also called Extranet. The frontend is what the customer sees, while the backend is where they enter their products, check their sales, and add content to your site. I have personally tested Joomla with Virtuemart and Magento plugin. And here is some information on both.

Joomla it is one of the largest community supported CMS out there. It has hundreds of free modules and components, as well as thousands of forums on the Internet. Joomla has a component called Virtuemart which is also an open source community program. It is easy to install and has many additional plugins as well as a great support community. Joomla and Virtuemart run on very simple servers and don’t have many special needs. I used this solution for my first web store (which I still manage today).

Magento is an eCommerce solution that is built and designed to sell, while Joomla can be used to create non-eCommerce websites. Magento is strictly commercial. One of my favorite parts of Magento is that it’s all built in, here are some of the features that are already in the 1.4.1.1 package that I’m currently using.

• Integrated PayPal website payment standards
• Canonical URLs for SEO
• Google Sitemap (SEO)
• Reports
• wish list
• compare products
• Google Analytics Ecommerce Integration
• Easy Backup
• Import and export via XML or CSV

There are many more options that come in the Magento package that need to be installed separately on Virtuemart. But it’s not all sweet with Magento, the downside is that it’s more demanding than Joomla and Virtuemart, which means you’ll need a dedicated or Virtual Dedicated server. Most shared hosting will not suffice to run a Magento store. Which means it will be more expensive to run, a shared host could cost as little as $4-5 per month, while a virtual dedicated server will start around $20-30 per month and a dedicated server from $150-$250. I have been using Virtual Dedicated Servers which have worked very well for all my stores. I even added 3-4 more websites on the same server without any significant speed issues.

So now that we have almost everything done, we need to get our products in, sell them, and get paid. There are several ways to accept payments depending on your region and country. If you’re in the UK or US, for example, PayPal offers a full integration that accepts PayPal payments and credit card payments without the customer needing a PayPal account. If you are not in the UK or US there are other options such as Moneybookers which has a module for Magento that is easy to set up. It is important that you can accept payments, otherwise how are you going to sell? Some delivery companies will pay you cash on delivery, but that would be for a more localized sale.

I recommend that you hire an SEO expert to help you with optimization and give you important tips BEFORE you start building your site.

So now that you have the guidelines, do some more research and take the online world of e-commerce by storm.