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Getting Started:

What basic design principles do I need to know to design my own website?
What is a shopping cart?
What does a shopping cart do?
How do I get a shopping cart?

What basic design principles do I need to know to design my own website?
You can use many of the same design principles that you'd use in making a brochure. Alignment is very important. Decide whether you're going to use left, center, or right alignment and then stick to your choice throughout your website. Left alignment should be the easiest choice for you to work with. Always organize your materials and make sure that your page design reflects the organization. Put related materials close together on the page and separate unrelated materials with plenty of white space. Decide which of your materials are most important. Put the important materials toward the top of the page. This is prime real estate. Make sure that font sizes reflect importance. Don't make all the text on the page the same size. Put important headlines in large, bold type and less important text is small, regular font. For an easy to understand guide to web design find a copy of Robin Williams Non-Designer's Web Book.

What is a shopping cart?
A shopping cart is the scripting (software) added to your web site that allows a customer to select and order merchandise at your online store. Usually a shopping cart uses a database to store your product information. 

What does a shopping cart do?
In order to sell merchandise on your web site you must have a shopping cart. The shopping cart provides you with a way to put your product catalog on your website as well as providing a way for your customers to order products.

How do I get a shopping cart?
Developing a shopping cart is a task suited only to programmers, so you will need to either purchase a shopping cart and add it to your web site yourself, hire a web site developer to add a shopping cart to your site, pay a monthly fee to your web host to provide you with the use of a shopping cart, or obtain a cart (possibly free) from a business (e.g. a third party payment processor) that wants your business for some other reason. Under most circumstances we recommend buying, rather than renting, a shopping cart because it is far more economical over the long run.