After years of building websites and getting them to rank well on the search engines I finally decided to take a stab at building my own on-line store.

Even with a good amount of internet savvy creating a store is no easy task. Over the last week I have spent untold hours creating accounts and testing the products from the following suppliers.

• Shopify
• Network Solutions - CommerceSpace
• Go Daddy Quick Shopping Cart
• ProStores - an ebay company

My first decision was to just go with something quick and easy,  so I took a look at shopify, Network Solutions - CommerceSpace,  Go Daddy Quick Shopping Cart and ProStores - an ebay company. I did not like any of them for the following reasons. I’m a big SEO guy and I like to have full control over things like page titles, descriptions, keywords and header tags. I also like the ability to add a blog (preferably wordpress) to the package.

Shopify: Argh, looks ok but very little SEO control.
Network: Solutions: I can’t justify paying $34.00 a year for a domain name when I can purchase them for $7.00 - overpriced and no “Free Trial”
Godaddy: A decent user admin, great SEO tools, crappy templates, no FTP access. If they had better templates I would have gone with this option but every template they had looked like it was from 1997.
Prostores: Pretty good looks,  decent SEO but not enough control over the templates and no way to add a blog.

After reviewing these hosted solutions I decided the only way for a control freak like myself to build what he really wanted would be to host my own and have full control over every aspect.

Later today I’ll be installing OS Commerce and Magento on a test server to take them for a spin. Both are open source.

For anyone reading this I just saved you a week of trial and error. If you want something nice that performs well on the search engines and you don’t want to spend a lot of money you are going to have to build it yourself!

Update: I just finished my OS Commerce Install. The install was easy, the out of the box usability is lacking. Anything cool you want to add you have to do it by hand. There are hundreds of modules you can download from the user community. Some are free but many are pay per module.  SEO friendliness is not something you get out of the box. There are no SEO friendly URL’s, unique page titles, descriptions or keywords.

Update - Magento is the winner. It blows all of the other open source e-commerce solutions out of the water.
Pros: looks great out of the box, very SEO friendly
Cons:  A bit complicated and runs slow on a slow server. Solution? Read the book and run it on a fast server!

http://carguideprice.com launched today. What is carguideprice? The truth? It’s an exact match domain name with a high volume of monthly search traffic and the reason for this post is to get the site indexed. Sneaky huh? Just standard operating procedure if you are looking to generate a little extra traffic quickly. The downside is that the majority of high volume exact match domain names have already been purchased and are being held for ransom with prices over $1000 for something that should cost less than $10 a year. Rather than get a great name like CarPriceGuide.com I had to settle for something that does not make as much sence but still should suck in a good deal of traffic. I’ll give updates on this experiment in the coming weeks.

All I want for Christmas is a “That’s What She Said T Shirt” from Collegeflavor.com

Realtor Jeff Lanuza recently joined the ranks of Ocean Atlantic Sotheby’s agent to choose AMPS211 as the designer for his new Real Estate Website. Jeff specializes in  home sales in the Golf Community of Bear Trap Dunes.  Bear Trap is made up of Single Family Homes, Townhomes, Villas and Condos with re-sale prices of 2br/2ba condos starting around $250,000. Other communities that Jeff is extremely comfortable in talking about include Millville By The Sea and Sea Colony.

We wish Jeff the best of luck in this shaky 2009 real estate sales season.

My parents who live in Michigan have been holding off on purchasing a new car for a few years.  As loyal GMC customers they have been dreaming about a new CTS Saginaw Cadillac With the Cash for Clunkers Voucher, they were able to purchase their dream car for a fraction of the cost it would have been without this incentive.  The sales professionals at Shaheen GM in Mt. Pleasant Michigan sell cars both new and used and treated my parents with courtesy and respect. If you are looking for Mt. Pleasant Used Cars or a Alma Buick don’t hesitate to give them a call at 989.546.4102