Best Consignment Shop Software

[Steve Henning]

Until shop profits warrant the added expense of a web site and web hosting (renting a computer where your site resides for public access), a sufficient start is free web hosting.

Many businesses offer free sites and hosting. The honest providers do so because they are paid by their advertisers for displaying ad's along with your web page, and they hope that you will find the free services limited and will upgrade to paying status. Paying $10-$30 per month for web hosting is never necessary. See the forum 'Cheap Web Hosting'.

The unscrupulous providers of free services do so to obtain and sell your email address and to install spyware/adware on your computer, to name a couple.

Using Yahoo! GeoCities Free or Microsoft Office Live won't escape the free ads on your site and the hosting limits, but you should be protected from exploitation.

Each provide web-site-design tools or wizards, a free domain name (web address, URL), e-mail accounts, limited storage and data transfer, visitor traffic analysis and reports. MSN provides e-mail support. Yahoo doesn't. MSN is a bit more generous with disk space, bandwidth (amount of data transferred per month from your site to your visitors) and email accounts. MSN would be our first choice.

About Domain Names

The web-site URL from Yahoo! will look like this: geocities.com/your-Yahoo!-ID.

MSN says you will be able to chose and register your own domain name (like www.yourbusinessname.com) if the name is not already taken. This looks more business-like that the Geocities URL.

Signing Up

I was a bit taken back when, in signing up with MSN, I was asked for credit-card information. Why if it's a free service? For good reasons: Requiring a valid credit card prevents scammers from abusing the system (one site per card #) and gives some assurance that reputable people are enlisting.

Here's how our Free Consignment Resources site turned out. Admittedly, even after having designed over 250 web sites myself, it took some time to learn MSN's procedures.
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Steve Henning
877-669-0854
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