(I should also note that I’ve received some criticism about the viability of the concept from DP forum members and some others. Essentially, many people are used to “free” wallpapers and don’t think there will be a market for what I’m trying to do. The point is noted and if the concept does bust, I have nobody to blame but myself…)

Now I had to decide how I was going to sell these items on a website. I purchased a domain name (to be disclosed later) and starting wrestling over exactly “how” I was going to do this. My initial thoughts were:

1. Static HTML site with paypal cart
2. Packaged PHP site like http://www.ktools.net/photostore/
3. Open source ecommerce site

The static HTML site seemed easy enough but it didn’t offer me much in the way of out of the box functionality. I quickly abandoned that idea. The packaged PHP site seemed like a winner, but I balked at the price. This left me with exploring ecommerce sites.

My hosting package has a few shopping carts ready for install via fantastico so I started researching. I finally decided on Zen Cart to power my site. Because my ISP didn’t have the latest version, I had to install it manually. Let me warn you now that you need to have a certain level of technical savvy before trying that.

I got it up and running in about an hour. I hated the green template it uses so I’ve spent a number of hours modifying the site to my tastes. You get a ton of admin features on a separate admin panel. One nice thing is that Zen Cart is designed to let you override the template or PHP files. You can make a separate folder for your mods so that you won’t lose everything when you need to upgrade to the next version. Great thinking on their part.

It’s been a week so far of non-stop effort to get the site up. I would say that it’s been 60% reading forums and 40% working PHP and CSS. It’s kinda like building a plastic model of a B-17. Lots of time, effort, and attention to detail.

In future blogs, I’ll discuss going live and promotions.