June 15th, 2012 
FatCow We’re going to be selling a book online, and would like to create a simple website that allows us to advertise the book, have a Paypal link, and possibly have a feature that will allow buyers to download the book. We’ve seen IPage and Fatcow, but aren’t sure either is kosher. What is the best web host and website-creator for such a thing?
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on: 1st January 70
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Take a look at the following website. It has many articles, intended to help small businesses, on how to create a website. They cover many topics: website design, web hosting, set up for e-commerce, etc.
http://www.marketingzone.com/how/websites
http://www.marketingzone.com/1253-how-create-website-your-business
http://www.marketingzone.com/658-e-commerce-how-guide-small-business
before buying a web hosting I suggest you compare the top providers! Take a look this site
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Also, you can find exclusives offers and coupon codes!
Check out: http://www.thehosthunter.com.
They list top rated web hosting companies.
There are a few for under $4 per month and I think they’re all kosher.
There are lots of ways that you can do such a thing and with lots of hosts. I’ll probably recommend from what I know – I’ve seen it getting used at many places.
In order to sell your book, you should be easily able to place a paypal link on your site which your visitors can use to pay you. There is also another service called e-junkie.com which you might want to check out. They are not free but are reasonably priced and for stuff like books where you can allow your visitors to download the pdf format of the book.
Instead of the hosts you have mentioned, I’d recommend you to take a look at hostgator.com. They are much much better even though they might be slightly higher priced. But that price can be brought down if you use coupons. MONTH1FREE is a coupon which gets your first month hosting for just 1 cent and HOSTGATOR25OFFER is the other coupon that gets you 25% off your hosting bill. This saves quite a lot if you sign up for longer durations.
They have a website builder which you can use or if you want to go the other way, you can also use frameworks like WordPress to create your site.
Hope that helps.
If you’re on a tight budget, I recommend creating your own business website. There are a number of options depending on how savvy you are with web design and development.
My best advice is to take a serious look at using WordPress to create your business website.
WordPress has matured into a robust website development platform largely through its enhanced user-interface, built-in SEO (Search Engine Optimization) capabilities, and excellent content management features. When you add to this a huge range of available themes and an impressive array of plugins that extend the features of WordPress, you have one of the most powerful yet easy to use website development platforms available. And all of this for free!
The benefits of a WordPress site:
* large selection of free themes
* easy interface, even for beginners
* built-in SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
* simple, quick additions or changes
* extended feature-set from plugins
* large and increasing support community
* free
There are essentially two ways to go with WordPress:
1. WordPress.com – where you host your site on the WordPress servers. This is more limited and may restrict your future growth.
2. WordPress.org – this option involves installing the free WordPress software on your own server, or on a hosted server, and managing it yourself.
I would suggest option 2, as this gives you the most flexibility and options for growth.
WordPress offers some impressive documentation for installing and developing your own website:
http://codex.wordpress.org/
You can also find a guide for building and managing a business WordPress site here:
Small Business Guide to WordPress Websites
Hope that helps.
I got Hostgator over a year ago and I’ve never been happier.
A big factor for me was support. They were very responsive and helpful when I needed them.
I signed up through http://www.10bestecommercehosting.com and I was able to get 20% off through them. Their simplest plan, which will be more than enough for a regular website, came out to like $4 a month with the discount.
For website creator, I’d use WordPress (which hostgator fully supports)
They also have their own easy website creator or you can find someone off craigslist or elance to put one up for you.
Ipage and FatCow both have sitebuilders but I believe they may be limited in the number of pages you can create. If you are only looking to have 5 or so pages for your simple website then their sitebuilders should be fine for you. But I recommend you look into installing WordPress on your website and using it as your site’s platform instead of using one of the many website builders out there. Most web hosts have easy 1 click WordPress installations within your web hosting account “Control Panel”. Check out web hosting hub http://www.castironhostingreview.com/webhostinghub-review.html
Once you have WordPress installed you can choose from 1,000′s of free templates and adding content to your site is very easy.
Turns out a lot of people think it’s GoDaddy only to be severely mistaken.
I found an expert article that might help:
http://www.bryanhadaway.com/web-hosting-best-vs-worst/
Thanks
I think http://easydch.com/sitebuilder would work great for your needs. You get a true professional looking website and there is a widget to add PayPal items directly to the pages.