To set up your website, you will need to have somewhere to put it, which means you will most likely have to pay for web hosting. Web hosting will provide you with a space for your site on the web, and often with email. There are some pretty cheap web hosts out there for between $5 - $15 a month.

You may also want to purchase a domain name, which can cost about $15 per year. This would be something like www.yourname.com.

Some web hosts will offer you a deal on the full package. For instance, Dreamhost offers a plan where you get a domain name free for one year when you purchase hosting.

If you are running an e-commerce website, other costs will include the fees charged by your payment processor, and possibly purchasing a SSL certificate for your site to protect your customers' payment information.

We try to create your site so you will be able to update and maintain it on your own, and the shopping cart programs we use don't charge fees, so once we've created your site for you, there will be no further expenses, unless you would like us to do further work on your site.

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Designing and building an ecommerce site from start to finish usually takes about two months. This includes creating and revising the site design, coding the template, setting up payment processors and secure certificates, giving you time to add all your content, and testing the site thoroughly.

We can do a site more quickly than this if you have all your content ready and reply to us quickly at every stage of the project.

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Before we get started on your site we send you a huge email with a lot of design questions for you to answer. Once we feel like we have a good idea of what you're looking for, we design a site idea for you. From here, you can request changes to the design, or we can scrap it and start over. As long as you're clear on what you want, you won't end up stuck with a site you don't like if you work with us!

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We prefer to get started discussing what you want over email. For more detail or in-depth conversations, we'd love to talk to you on instant messenger. If you prefer to work these things out over the phone, we can do that as well.

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It helps a lot when working on a site to know what exactly is going to be on it, so we will need as much content in the form of text, photos, articles, item descriptions, etc. before starting.

If you don't yet have content ready, but have a good idea of what will be on your site, we can get started on a site design and add content as we go, but it's usually best to have a solid starting point.

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Sure! This will usually be cheaper than a full site design, too, as we won't have to come up with a navigation concept or more than one page.

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Yes, if we like it and think it will work to make a functional and user-friendly website. You can create the design a number of ways:

• Design the whole thing in Photoshop or Illustrator, send me the file, and we'll put it together.
• Send us a rough sketch of what you want (either as a computer image, or draw it on a piece of paper and send it to us).
• Design it in your head and then try to describe it to us - but you'd better be really good at describing!

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You have a few options here, depending on how we set your site up.

• Our ecommerce programs are designed so you can update your entire site from the web-based admin tool. From adding and editing products to adding and editing your information pages (such as your about page, your ordering info page, etc.). If we set you up with a shopping cart program, you will be able to make all of your updates yourself quite easily.
• If you aren't running a shop, but want a site that you can update yourself through a web-based admin, we can set your site up using a Content Management System. We will create a template, and you will be able to add, edit, and delete pages from your site through a tool.
• If you just want to be able to update a part of your site, we can stick a blog into the page that you will be able to update yourself through Blogger, LiveJournal, WordPress, Moveable Type, or your blogging software of choice. This way you can update the news without ever touching the HTML code.
• If we just do a simple site for you, without any content management software, the basic HTML used to write text on your site is really simple. So if your updates will consist almost entirely of text changes or additions, we can give you a tutorial for how to do this yourself. We can also code the site to make the areas you can change as clearly marked as possible. The time spent in teaching you how to update your site is free, unless it gets excessive.

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PayPal is probably the simplest way to accept payment, and the cart programs we use work with PayPal. They charge a small fee per transaction, but using PayPal means you don't have to purchase a merchant account of your own to process credit cards. There are other services you can use to process credit card payments, all with different fees and rates, and we can discuss these in greater detail when working together.

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Nope! We use PCs primarily, but we also have a Mac for testing, so there shouldn't be any file problems. Both the cart programs we use have an HTML editor feature that works with IE on the PC, so you may not be able to use that, but it's just a convenience, not a necessity.

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Just a web browser! If you sell things in a shop, it would help to have a digital camera and some sort of image-editing program to resize and improve product photos.

If you are running an e-commerce website, you may need a SSL certificate (secure certificate) to protect your customers' payment information. This depends on which cart you choose and which payment processor(s) you use on your site.

You only need an SSL certificate if you are accepting credit card information on your own website. For instance, if you use PayPal or 2checkout as your payment processor, your customer clicks to buy on your site and they are taken to PayPal's (or 2checkout's) website to complete payment. In this case, you don't need an SSL certificate. However, if you are using PayPal Payments Pro, Authorize.net, Linkpoint, or another service like these, then customers will be entering their credit card information on your site. In this case, you will need the SSL certificate.

When we have set up the SSL certificate for your site, your customers will see https:// (instead of http://) in the location bar of their browser, and they will see a lock icon, showing that their information is secure with your site.

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