The Impossible View
Just set up another blog for a new project, this can be found at; www.jtportfolio.com/blog/impossibleviewAlso, will probably add a new page to my web site, a blog page. This will have all the links to my different blogs, as well as a little info about them.
A money raising scheme, part 2
Ok, the online store idea has been scrapped, for now. The main reason being postage for aboard.
My new idea is to sell web hosting. As I believe that this will be much easier.
I will still use an e-commerce store front in order to sell it, just instead of physical products; it will be web hosting packages.
When my hosting for my current web site becomes up for renewal, I will then purchase a reseller web hosting package. Use one of the accounts for my own (possible two, one for portfolio and one for the selling of the hosting packages) and sell the others on.
I am hoping that my main market segments will be clients that I have already designed there web sites, as well as new clients in the future. I am also hoping that a large segment will be from course colleagues, who are about to set up there own online portfolio.
I believe that my packages will sell, as I will be offering more services that you would get with basic packages from bigger companies, but at a fraction of the price.
A money raising scheme
I plan to set up a basic online store selling professionally printed photos, with the choice of framing.
My criteria for this project are that it must cost me as little as possible to set up and run, as well as, as easy as possible to maintain.
Costs can be kept down to a minimum by the following things:
- Already have a huge amount of web hosting space with my portfolio, so I will use a section of that for hosting.
- There is quite a wide chose of free shopping cart software available. The problem is finding the right one for me.
- By only accepting PayPal as a method of payment, I can accept credit card payments (from non-PayPal members as well) and all the processing of these will be done by PayPal. In exchange PayPal will take a small percentage of the same.
- I can upgrade my existing PayPal account to a merchant account for free. This will allow the above.
- My excising printer can print to a higher quality than most “home printers”, so with the right kind of photo paper, I can do the printing myself.
From this project I hope that I will make a little money, as well as making my feel more confident in PHP, MySQL and the general working of an online cart and e-commerce in general.
