In order to use WordPress as an online store, the standard blog layout simply will not do the job. I’m imagining a really stripped down grid affair, with no advertising from Google or Amazon, because that would look really unprofessional.

I’m hoping it will be possible to kick a WordPress theme into shape in order to use it as a store. Not that I’ve found much evidence to support this yet, apart from a vaguely remembered website promising to make WordPress do things it’s creators never envisaged…

More research and theme hacking is about to be undertaken I imagine.

It looks like it is incredibly simple to set up an online store these days. As long as you’ve got something to sell, a website to act as a storefront and a PayPal account, you can get yourself set up in next to no time.

Companies out there will take all the difficult stuff off your hands. You can just add buttons to your site and have a fully functioning shopping cart and checkout system up and running in minutes…. Impressive.

E-junkie is the company I’ve been looking at. They just charge a flat fee per month depending on the number of items you are offering for sale. That’s the number of products you are offering, not the number of individual sales you make.

So, for example, their lowest rate is just $5 a month for 10 products. Drop some code on the website and viola, away you go. It works just as well for tangible items as it does for non-physical products (mp3’s, ebooks, etc). It really does lower the barriers to entry for an online store to virtually undetectable levels.

Got an email a day or two ago from the Amazon Associates program I signed up for. They very nicely pointed out that I had yet to make a sale thru the Amazon website. Which I thought was nice of them. Please do point out the fact that I don’t yet have the traffic of YouTube or Google.

It did make me laugh though, one of their suggested solutions was to plaster the site with even more ads for Amazon. Hardly subtle, is it. Still, nice to know that their automated systems are thinking of me…

Cheeky monkeys.

I know, it’s hardly the sexiest topic in the world, but it’s a necessary evil if you want to place highly in search results. To this end I’ve followed some handy tips from the man at thesitewizard, who’s obviously done this before.

All my post now have proper names instead of search engine unfriendly ‘?post_id=<a_number>’ type identifiers. The only thing I can’t get rid of is the little double arrow in the title bar of the browser. It’s almost as if it’s hard coded into WordPress. More investigation needed…

The other thing I learnt recently was not to put links away from your site in the opening few sentences of your post. (Fairly obvious when you say it out loud, isn’t it) So if you do want to see what thesitewizard has to say for himself, click here.

As mentioned a while ago, I’ve registered www.onecubicmetre.com and www.onecubicmetre.co.uk. At the moment they are just Heart Internet domain holding pages, because I’ve not bought a hosting package yet.

What I’m unsure of is whether to make the .com or the .co.uk domain the ‘master’. At the moment the .co.uk address redirects to the .com address. So effectively the .com is the master address. I’m just not sure if this is the right way round.

Will it have a broader appeal as a .com? Will people from outside the UK see the .co.uk and assume it’s got nothing to say to them?

Comments on this matter would be very much appreciated.