Hi .....I found this site this afternoon-and it is so great! I spent a good few hours reading thru a number of the articles under the "building", and "design" sections..and they are very helpful.
I am a small business owner with no experience designing sites, and no experience with HTML, but I am anxious to learn, and I want to do this myself rather than hire a designer. I usually learn quickly, and have been doing a lot of research online, and trying demos of various webhosts software, however-there is one thing that is really confusing me in the material I've read-and I hope someone can help me....please forgive that this post is a bit long, but I want to make sure I explain this clearly---so that someone who takes the time to read it has enough info to guide me in the right direction......

As I've been researching webhosts, I've viewed a number of online demos of their web building software, be it templates, or a WYSIWIG design pgm like coffee cup, easy web 6, etc. All those demos showed that the creation of your pages, creation of your categories of items, description and pictures and pricing of items--all was done via the template or software building program. Then after all that was done, they showed that you are to add a cart-and presented options that came with their hosting package. All that made sense.

I then wanted to understand how the cart functionality integrated with the rest of a website that had just been built with templates or coffee cup, etc., and I found the article here on this site about open source shopping carts. I also went to the sites of Zen cart, OS cart, Cube cart, etc--and now I'm totally confused-because the info about carts indicates that you are to use the functionality provided by the [I]cart software[I] to create a catalog of your items for sale, create drop downs for product options, set pricing, descriptions of your products etc.

I don't understand...... didn't you already do all of that when you created your webpages using the web design software? Do you have to key the same info again into the cart software?
Can someone help me understand this? Am I building the web pages including the items and description of items using the design software or the cart functionality? What do I use the web building software for versus the cart software and how do they integrate with each other?
Many thanks in advance!