Website/E-Commerce question. (hosting/webdesign/domain stuff)

[RootedPhoenix]

First the background, then the questions.

I run a jewelry/gift shop on Etsy. I'd like to ease myself away from there by starting my own site. I discovered that Wordpress has a lot of the tools that I'd need to make this happen, but I don't know about hosts or who I should register my domain with.

I intend to do the webdesign myself, as I should be okay at filling the gap between me and Wordpress. I do okay with webdesign, I just need to brush up on loads of things.

Since this site will host 9 bazillion photos of my pieces, I'm going to assume that I need a fair amount of space and bandwidth.

I intend to just use my own real name as the domain, because that seems the most professional.

I don't know if $100-200 is a stupid amount to budget for this, but it's what I'll have when I put my project into action.

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So now, the questions.
1) Who should I go to for domain registration?
2) Who has reliable hosting, and customer service folks who know what they're talking about and are nice?
3)How to I figure out how much space and bandwidth I need?
3) Do you guys have any recommendations for ways to brush up on things? I know some things about CSS and XHTML/XML, but I get the feeling that my knowledge is really very outdated.
4) Is Wordpress a terrible bunch of people to work with?

I welcome any recommendations you guys have. I also know that "should" isn't the best word, as opinions on hosting/domain services vary a lot. But I need services that I can contact easily if something's going wrong.

[csquared]

I would take a look at GoDaddy. Hosting is not a bad price. They also have all the tools for setting up a shopping cart.

[Pedersen]

I'll be blunt: You're doing something you should probably *not* be doing. The questions you are asking are ones you should already have most of the answers to in order to do what you're saying.

Here's a short list of the things you did not mention:

• How will you be getting paid? Are you going to use Paypal, Google Checkout, take credit cards yourself?
• How are you going to ensure security? You're either going to be using a site that handles security for you (in which case, why bother leaving etsy?), or you're going to be doing it yourself (in which case, get ready, that's not an easy thing to maintain).
• How are you going to handle backups? if something goes wrong, you're going to need to restore.
• What type of hosting are you looking for? Will someone/someplace else handle the hardware, the operating system, and the software, and you just deal with uploading and updating content? Are you looking for someplace that will hand you a machine and let you go to town?
• How much coding can you do? How much are you expecting (or expected) to do? Will you be hacking on Wordpress, on a plugin, or just some nifty Javascript?

Like I said, that's the short list. Running a site on the internet has challenges. Those challenges go *way* up once you start taking money, and that sounds like something you're planning on doing.

[RootedPhoenix]

Backups: I will keep a copy of all my work on my computer.
Hosting: I just want to deal with uploading and updating content.
Payment gateway: I will start with Paypal, while researching other payment gateways.

As for security, shopping carts, and a lot of the coding, it's my understanding that Wordpress has a lot of that available to put into the sites. I would just be dealing with filling in the gaps.

Etsy is a worthy service, but they don't offer me what I need. I can't fully link all of my social media together. I don't look professional on Etsy, because it's all their branding, not mine.

Etsy is also extremely unclear on their rules. If they don't like something, they can, and will take things down without warning, and they won't tell you what it was that you did wrong, or how to fix it. That scares me.

[cybiko123]

The first thing you're going to need to decide is what shopping cart/platform to choose. WordPress is a blogging platform (or at best, a very simple CMS). It is not an eCommerce platform.

Since you said you'd be using PayPal, you have plenty of options to choose from. Magento and osCommerce are two popular (and free) options, but they're certainly not the only ones. Since they both offer a demo of some kind, play around with each and see what you like. Magento is geared more toward larger sites/businesses and requires more resources, but is more customizable "out-of-the-box" than osCommerce. osCommerce is for smaller sites and is less customizable (without custom programming), but its hosting requirements are much lower.

With domains, you can really get one from just about anywhere, but read everything you sign; some less scrupulous companies will try to tack on additional products and services without providing an easy way to say "no" (1&1 and GoDaddy have been the worst offenders in my limited experience). It's also a bad idea to host with the same company providing your domain name (for a variety of reasons: control, security, and business continuity come immediately to mind).

As for hosting, without knowing what kind of traffic you expect and shopping cart you choose, it's hard to make an informed recommendation.