Launching Your Yahoo! Business

When deciding between the Store Editor tool and Web Hosting, there are three key issues that will affect your decision:

• How quickly do you want to get your site up and running for business?

• How much do you want to customize your site?

• How much experience do you have using HTML building software?

In this book, we will focus on users with no or very little HTML experience who want to use the Store Editor to build their stores as quickly as possible. If you are familiar with using HTML building software and want to use Web Hosting instead of Store Editor, please refer to our second book Making a Living with Your Yahoo! Store.

Caution:

Switching from Store Editor to Web Hosting can be a challenge and very time consuming. You may find yourself recreating all of your product pages. There are no easy conversion tools to help you export your Store Editor web pages and images into Web Hosting. You may even want to contact other Yahoo! store owners to see why they choose one over the other.

If Yahoo!'s Store Editor will build a storefront for you, why consider the Web Hosting option?

Web Hosting gives you more control over the look and feel of your store. It's great if you are familiar with HTML or HTML building software such as Dreamweaver or Microsoft's FrontPage. It will take more time to build your store than with Store Editor, but Web Hosting will allow you to use features such as PHP, ASP, Perl, and MySQL.

PHP and ASP are scripting languages that can be embedded inside your HTML and allow web pages to be dynamically generated from a database. Perl is also a programming language that is used to perform database access, networking, and more. MySQL is an open source database that can be used to store and retrieve data. Using MySQL in combination with Perl and/or PHP/ASP, you can create dynamic web pages such as product search pages, interactive forms, and dynamic postings of product reviews.

Most businesses prefer to use the Web Hosting option because they can customize the store to their clients' specific needs using popular HTML building tools.

Using HTML Building Software Tools

If you do decide to go the Web Hosting route then you should have experience with Dreamweaver, SiteBuilder, or some other HTML building tool. Let's take a look at a few of them.

Dreamweaver is Macromedia's premier WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) HTML authoring tool (www.macromedia.com). Dreamweaver is a popular software program that is widely used by professional web designers and developers. Yahoo! Merchant Solutions extensions for Dreamweaver are also available. Once you download and install the extensions from the Merchant Solutions website, you can use commands in the Yahoo! menu of Dreamweaver to quickly manage and update your product catalog with product page wizard. You can easily insert product information with a few mouse clicks.

You can download a trial version of Macromedia Dreamweaver at macromedia.com/software/dreamweaver/.

Yahoo! SiteBuilder is Yahoo!'s free HTML authoring tool. SiteBuilder comes with more than 380 templates to choose from. SiteBuilder is available for stores with 100 or fewer products.

For more information and to download SiteBuilder, please visit help.yahoo.com/help/us/store/edit/sitebuilder.

Store Editor is an online tool that lets you develop and host your online store using just a web browser on any computer with an Internet connection. It's easy as point, click, and fill in the blanksperfect for those who want to get their site up and running as quickly as possible.

It also comes with a generic template that you can customize. Using variables, you can customize attributes such as text font, buttons, backgrounds, link color, image dimensions, and more.

Store Editor will allow you to create or update your store in an online staging area, and once you're ready to go live, all you have to do is click on the Publish button.

All the pages are hosted on the "store" subdomain for your account. For example, if your web site address is www.yourdomain.com, the store website address would be store.yourdomain.com. Yahoo! also allows you to direct the homepage of your website to the store.yourdomain.com sub-domain. For more information, visit help.yahoo.com/help/us/store/manage/sitesettings/sitesettings-27.html.

Customization with Store Editor

Store Editor comes with a standard template. You can add a background image; change background color, link color, button size, font size, and font type; change image dimensions; upload your logo; change your navigation button properties; add custom variables; and much more. Store Editor comes with an easytouse form to change any of the variable options.

Yahoo! store comes with a standard template look and feel. Although you can change simple variables such as background color, button size, button color, and font type, you will not be able to create a unique look and feel unless you modify the template using RTML. The Yahoo! store standard template was designed for those who do not need a unique custom design and want to quickly get their stores up and running. In order to create a new template with your own unique design, you will need to learn RTML or hire an RTML designer.

Caution:

Yahoo! Merchant Solutions customer service cannot offer phone or email support on RTML and templates. Merchant Solutions customers will need to find outside consultants for assistance.

RTML is Yahoo!'s proprietary language for building store templates. RTML is for advanced programmers who don't want to use the Store Editor standard templates and want to customize their store's design templates. If you would like to customize your store, you may want to look into Web Hosting before attempting to learn RTML. You may find it easier to use WYSIWYG authoring tools such as Dreamweaver to customize your store layout.

You can also visit Yahoo!'s Designer Directory to find RTML programmers at smallbusiness.yahoo.com/merchant/designdir.php.