This week we discussed two different aspects of creating a web business: your site design and accepting credit card payments.
Site Design
Depending on what kind of web business you are creating, the design of your site will have to match your business. Many of the students in my class are creating merchant type of stores and so are creating sites that will highlight their products. Having a white or light background can help make the pictures of your products stand out from the rest of the site.
Since my site is an advertising/affiliate marketing type of site, and my content to drive visitors is based on blog posts, I decided on creating a traditional blog style of site. The main area of the website will have my posts, and the right sidebar will have links to my other posts, different categories of blog posts that they can look at, and also advertisements and affiliate links. Since its a well established design people will be comfortable navigating through the pages. It will be my goal to make a good color scheme decision in order to set my blog apart from other blogs.
Credit Card Payments
We were also tasked this week with creating a PayPal button that would be relevant to our site. I created a Donate button and getting the button setup through PayPal was really easy! You just have to put in what the name of your site is, the email address that PayPal will be sending the payments to, and then you can copy and paste the code into your website.
PayPal has it’s pros and cons. It is definitely easy to setup and use, but the transaction fees are higher than other payment services. Comparable services that we discussed were Square and Amazon. I like Square because its easy to scale if your business expands and they also have very competitive prices for processing fees.
My site won’t need any sort of payment buttons or shopping carts, but it was fun to practice creating a PayPal button in case I need it for the future. I was actually able to use PayPal for my friends non-profit and got it setup really quickly and easily.
