Ok, 1st real post:

Frustrated with many of the off the shelf shopping sites out there, I decided that enough is enough and I'd learn how to create one. After having many discussions on programming languages with many developers out there I settled on Python with the Django framework. Many reasons for that but the main ones being:

1.) Speed (Extreemly fast and beats almost any other framework out there)
2.) Ease of programming (The framework was originally designed for a newspaper site, but has grown and grown into something quite special and supports all manner of things like rss feeds, sitemaps etc,..) - all the things which are needed also for a good shop.
3.) MVC based (model , view, controller). This means that the design of the site is kept seperate from the code and makes for very clean operation and management.
4.) Already in-build admin available with no programming needed at all.

The site took approx 3 months to build from scratch as has full functionality of quite a lot of shops out there and any additional features take only a day or so to build in now.

I started with no plan except to start with the product selling page and then work backwords building the rest of the site.

So my thinking and programming was in this order:

1.) Page that sells a product.
2.) Pages to display the products.
3.) Other pages such as "about us", etc,..
4.) Finally the front page.
5.) Add google analytics to all pages (including feeding it your sale value on the sale confirmation page) - More on this later.
6.) Go Live.
7.) Marketing.

If anyone wants to see the language used and a resouce on it, you can do a search on google for "django project".

If you want to know any more details on the programming side, then please stop me.

I'll now start with the Marketing section and will add to this as the days move on. By the way, the site is now selling products and today has been a good day already. (Thanks to Google).

Step 1: I would say that Google is one of the most (if not the most) important search engines to get listed in first and there is a great way to do this right off the bat...... Google base. The site I produced has a google base feed which dynamically updates with every sale on the site, so the feed is always current and accurate. It has been setup that Google calls a url on my site and automatically retrieves the feed on a daily basis. This is very easy to set-up, but can also be uploaded manually with a spreadsheet. I would reccomend that anyone with products uploads a google base feed as their very first action. Google will list your products within 1 day and you will start to get traffic by day 2 (although small at first). After I added my feed to google, I got 30 uniques on the second day, rising to 50 on the 3rd day and it continues to rise.

Step 2: It is a good idea to post your site on MarketingProfs website asking for opinions on your site. This serves 2 purposes. Firstly, you will get a good idea as to what things you should change (I have a list of around 10 things to do). Secondly, you get your first link-back to your site from a very well known and indexed site.

Step 3: Yahoo and MSN both have the ability to upload a feed just like google, however it takes an age for those search engines to use the feed, so it's best to do this as early as possible in your marketing effort to ensure that a month or two down the line you are also getting traffic from these sites.

Step 4: Either use a submission service or use your own tool to submit to as many directories and search engines as possible. Even though you will not get traffic straight away, it will begin to trickle in over time.

More steps to come soon.... at this point my site is getting 100 uniques per day, just from the above actions and sales are coming in.

Watch this space.