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Use a Website Builder to Create Your eCommerce Site in 8 Steps

The post Use a Website Builder to Create Your eCommerce Site in 8 Steps appeared first on HostGator Blog . Today building an online store is easier than ever. As a result, eCommerce stores have been exploding in popularity. Before, you’d need to hire a professional developer to build the complex elements required to sell products online . But, with today’s web builders you can literally drag and drop your way towards creating your first eCommerce store. Below you’ll learn how a website builder can help you build an eCommerce store in record time, the benefits to doing so, and the steps you’ll want to take to get started. Why Use a Website Builder? When you’re building an eCommerce store you have a lot on your plate. You not only have to research your market, name your store, determine what products you’re going to sell, set your prices, calculate shipping, and market your store, but you need to build a website on top of all that. To make your life much easier, you can simply choose from dozens of professionally designed and created eCommerce themes available with a website builder. Then, all you have to do is customize them to your liking. This will not only save you a ton of time, but it takes the guesswork out of designing a store that looks good and converts.   What to Look for in an eCommerce Website Builder You’re going to have a lot of options to choose from when it comes to choosing the right eCommerce website builder for your needs. There are a ton website builders out there, but ultimately you’ll want to choose a builder that’s best suited to the needs and goals of your store. Here are some features to keep an eye out for: An extensive theme selection with niche-specific theme choices. A selection of responsive themes that look good and function properly on any screen size . A drag and drop builder to quickly customize your eCommerce site. Bundled eCommerce features like inventory management and coupon creation. A high-performance hosting environment behind the builder. A solid support team to walk you through any issues. Once you’ve settled upon an eCommerce website builder, it’s time to start creating your store. If you’re still unsure about what builder will be best suited for your needs, then take the new Gator builder for a spin. It includes all of the features above and more.   How to Use Gator to Create Your eCommerce Store Building out your eCommerce store with a website builder is a pretty simple and intuitive process. If you’re using the Gator builder, you can follow the simple steps below.   1. Select Your Theme Gator has over 100 responsive templates you can choose from, all of them designed by skilled professionals knowledgeable about web design best practices . And to save you time and make the choice easier, they’re categorized based on common types of websites , so you can quickly find a template that matches the kind of online store you’re starting. Every Gator template is responsive, so you don’t have to worry about doing any extra work to make sure your website looks good on mobile—which is crucial in an era when a significant amount of online shopping happens on mobile devices. But you can also quickly check and see how your website will look on a smaller screen during the design process by clicking on the mobile icon at the top of the editor. Take some time to browse your options and find something you like. The closer your template comes to the design you have in mind, the less work you’ll have to do to bring it line with your vision. And when you get your website done faster, you can launch your store and start making money sooner!   2. Customize Your Design Once you’ve selected your template, get to work customizing it for your business. Easily move any element on the page to where you want it to be by clicking on it, dragging it to a new spot, and dropping it into place. Add unique copy and change out fonts and text size by clicking on the text already on the page, or adding a new text box. You can do that by clicking on the plus sign in the editor, or in the Sections setting on the menu on the left side of the page. Change out the images included in the theme by uploading your own in the Style section on the right side of the screen, and add new ones by selecting Images when you go to add a new section. In the left side menu, you can add Elements to the page, such as buttons, contact forms, a map to your business site, and your social feeds. Also on the left side menu, you can easily change out the color scheme and backgrounds in the template, and add any new sections to the page you want included. The editor is designed to be easy for even beginners to use, so spend some time playing around in it to get a feel for what you can do.   3. Decide How to Organize Your Site Organizing your website well is important both to make sure it’s intuitive for your visitors and to improve your SEO. For an eCommerce store, a good site organization requires considering two main things: What are the most important pages to include on your main menu. What are the most customer-friendly categories to divide your products into Your main menu should include the most important pages on your website. For almost all businesses, that will include your Home page, About page, and a Contact page. For customers that provide services, it may also include a portfolio or gallery that collects examples of your work. For those with product-based businesses, you can include a general Products link in your main menu with the main product categories listed underneath it. Or you can include the main product categories in the menu themselves, if there aren’t that many. In Gator you can update the Menu by scrolling over it, clicking on Pages Menu, then selecting Manage Pages. You can drag different page names to the place in the menu you want them to be in. Delete a page from the menu by clicking on it, then clicking on the trash can that shows up to the right. And add a new page by clicking Add Page and filling in the information for it in the form that comes up. Gator will helpfully create a unique URL for you that reflects the page name, but you can edit the URL if you’d prefer it to be something else. When determining the best categories to use, try to get inside the heads of your customers and think about their priorities when looking for your products. If you sell floral arrangements, useful categories may include the main occasions people buy flowers for (weddings, sympathy, romantic gestures, etc.), price points, or the primary colors present in an arrangement. Think about what customers most consistently ask for when coming to you. In Gator you can manually create your most important category pages in the main editor, and also add more categories in the Store app, as you’ll see later in step #5. To add relevant subcategories that will show up in the dropdown for your main menu pages, add a new page for each subcategory and drag it underneath the page you’ve added to the main menu. You can use this page to highlight all the relevant products that fall into the category, and to optimize your site for the relevant SEO keyword. Figuring out your site’s organization will help you determine the different pages you need to create, which prepares you for our next step.   4. Create Your Main Pages Your template will come with a number of pages already created. Now you just need to make any changes to the pages already supplied so they match what you need, and add any new pages you want to the site. Common pages to consider creating (or modifying) in this step include: Your homepage that communicates your unique selling proposition (USP) and highlights your most popular products. An about page that tells visitors what your store is about and highlights your mission. A gallery or portfolio that showcases your work. High-level category pages that group similar products based on attributes your customers will be looking for A blog where you can post educational information, product updates, and more. A contact page that tells customers how to reach out and get in touch, and includes your address and hours if you have a physical location. For any pages you create that don’t come supplied with your theme, you can simplify the creation process by copying a similar page you already have and going from there. For each of these pages, take a few minutes to optimize them for SEO for keywords relevant to your online store. And consider opportunities to promote your email list or include CTAs to drive sales wherever relevant.   5. Upload Your Products With the above steps taken care of, it’s time to start adding your products to the website. In Gator, click on Store in the menu on the left side of the page, then Manage Products and Orders. This will take you to the Gator store app, where you can start adding your products. The app will walk you through the process in a number of easy steps. Select whether it’s a physical product or service. Fill in name, pricing info, and your description. Upload your product photo. And voila! You’ve created your product. You can add each product you’ve added to the relevant pages on your website by going into Elements, selecting Products, and dragging the product box to where you want it on the page.   6. Setup Your Payment Processor Without setting up and integrating a payment processor your customers will have no way of actually paying you. In the Gator store app, you can get your payment information set up by clicking on Settings, then Payment Providers. The app makes it easy to add PayPal and Stripe to your store, so you can securely process credit card payments. 7. Setup Your Order and Shipping Details Also in Settings, you can fill in the main information needed to complete orders, such as shipping costs, the address order emails will be sent to, and the tax rate that should be applied to all orders. Filling all these in will help automate the process when orders come in, so that you have an easier time processing them in a timely manner and tracking them over time. You can also add relevant legal documents, tracking details for shipments, and create templated customer emails to automatically go out when orders are made, shipped, and delivered. In the Advanced Features section, you can enable discounts, offer variations of products (such as by size or color), and simplify the shipping process with Shippo integration . You can also set up product categories that allow customers to display products grouped by attributes they have in common. While you can also create category pages in the Editor, this automates the process and makes it easier for you build out the different possible categories your customers may want to filter product results by.   Finish Your eCommerce Store and Launch! With Gator, you can build out a simple eCommerce store in a matter of hours. And while stores that include a lot of products or categories will take more time than that, adding everything you need will be a simple process. The faster you can get your website up, the sooner you start making money from it. Dive right in and start building now! Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading

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What to Look for in a Website Builder

The post What to Look for in a Website Builder appeared first on HostGator Blog . You know you need a website, but you don’t know the first thing about how to build one. Without any coding or design skills, you’re not really sure where to start. But these days, you don’t need a complex set of skills to design a website, you just need a good website builder. Website builders make creating and customizing a website easy enough for anybody to do it—no coding required. When you start looking into which website builder to use for your new website, you’ll notice that there are a lot of options to choose from. Trying to figure out which one to go with can be intimidating, especially if you don’t know enough to even know what to look for. Top 10 Features to Look for in a Website Builder When choosing the right website builder for you, there are ten main factors you should consider.   1. Ease of use A website builder is supposed to make the process of building a website easy (that’s kind of the whole point). When you’re considering what website builder to go with, make sure you find one that has an intuitive editing tool so you can easily shape your website to look and feel how you want it to. Drag-and-drop functionality is a good feature to look for, since it means you can move components of the page around with your mouse—something anyone can do, regardless of their level of web design experience. And the editing tool should have features that enable you to change out colors, add new elements to the page, and upload any media you want to add without having to learn any new skills.   2. Lots of templates The first step to creating a website with a website builder is choosing your template . The template provides a design and structure for you to start with, so you’re not having to build your site from scratch. From there, it’s easy to make changes to the template to make your website better represent your unique brand. Building your website will be easier if you’re able to select a template that comes close to what you have in mind for your site. So make sure the website builder you go with supplies a good number of templates for you to choose from.   3. Responsive options People now browse the web on their mobile devices more than their computers. For your website to work well for the majority of visitors, it needs to be mobile friendly. The best way to do that is to build a website that’s responsive. Responsive websites have all the same elements and content no matter what device you visit them on, but they’re automatically arranged in the way that makes them look good on whatever screen size a visitor views them on. The website builder you go with should offer an easy way for you to make your website responsive. Offering responsive templates is a good option, since you won’t have to do anything extra to make your website mobile friendly—you’ll start out with it that way.   4. Customization options Templates are great for making the website creation process easier, but you want to be sure you can turn that template into something unique. A good website builder should provide plenty of options for customizing your website. You should be able to change out colors, add new pages, load your own images, and add icons and buttons in the shapes and sizes you desire. You don’t want a website that looks just like everybody else’s, the whole point is to create something that represents your specific brand. Go with a website builder that gives you plenty of room to customize the template you choose to turn it into something wholly yours.   5. SEO features With so many websites already out there, getting people to find yours will be a challenge. A website builder that has SEO features can give you a little head start by helping you optimize your website’s pages for visibility in the search engines. Adding relevant keywords to each web page’s URL, meta description , and image tags communicates to Google what your website is about so they’re more likely to include you in searches for that term. A good website builder will make that easy to do.   6. Social share features Once your website’s up, you want to promote it! And ideally, you want visitors that like your site to promote it too. Social share features can help on both fronts. You can easily push out new content to your social networks to let your followers know about it, and you can make it easy for visitors to share your web pages with their followers with one click as well.   7. Affordability You probably don’t have a ton of money to spend on your website. And website builders generally bill on a subscription model, so you have to consider the long-term costs as well as what you can afford at this moment. Choose a website builder that falls within your ongoing budget for your website. Most website builders cost somewhere in the range of $4-$40 a month. In some cases, the cost includes features or services you would otherwise have to spend more for, so make sure you consider everything that’s included in the price instead of just going with the cheapest option.   8. Image library All websites need images, they’re a key part of how people will experience the site. Unless you’re a photographer or illustrator, finding good images to populate your site with can be difficult and time consuming. A website builder that includes an image library can save you a lot of trouble, make your website look great, and help you get your website up and running faster,   9. Educational resources While ideally, the website builder you use will be easy to figure out, you still want access to helpful resources that lay out what all the features are and how to use them. Check if the website builder you consider offers tutorials on how to use it. You’ll get more out of your website builder if you’re able to get a full understanding of everything it can do for you and how to make use of it all.   10. Good customer support If you face any issues while creating your website, or worse, once it’s up, you want to trust you can get ahold of someone to help fast. Look for a website builder that offers 24/7 support and has a reputation for being helpful when customers need it. Hopefully you won’t ever need customer support, but it’s important to know it’s there and reliable if you ever do. A website builder should make your life easier and enable you to put together a website that does everything you want it to. But it’s important to find one that offers everything you need.   Meet the HostGator Website Builder HostGator offers a website builder that does everything on the list and comes with web hosting included. You can save a little money by investing in both things at once, and get started creating the website you’ve been wanting. Find the post on the HostGator Blog Continue reading

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WordPress free hosting themes ?

Hello guys, I want to build a website, and I do not want to buy the template. Can you recommend me some free wordpress hosting themes ?… | Read the rest of http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1719564&goto=newpost Continue reading

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Proxmox V5 Windows Template

Hi, I looking for Windows Template for Proxmox, anyone have the Template that share with me ? or anyone know how may i create KVM window… | Read the rest of http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1719414&goto=newpost Continue reading

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[ HOSTINZA ] Isometric Design with WHMCS

Hostinza is a clean, Isometric modern web hosting created for people with life passion for hosting business.. This template is highly suitab… | Read the rest of http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showthread.php?t=1718214&goto=newpost Continue reading

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