Hello,

I spend quite some times reading post on thsi forum and I learned a lot... so thanks to everyone. But still, I am a newbie and there is still a lot of obscure fields... And I don't know anything about programming.

I have to make a hard decision, and I was hoping some of you could give me their opinion. I am about to hire someone to design my ecommerce.

I have 2 choices:

1) My first idea was to have someone to create the website for a one time fee, buy a shopping cart (I was thinking of xcart), use a hosting service (I was thinking of hostgator), plus I want to use a forum on the website (like SMF) and somehow put everything together (I am not sure who would do it but I guess I can figure it out later). So basically, as for the monthly fees I would only have the hosting service (exept for the merchant account and gateway of course).

2) 2nd option: a company called websiteforge, they will charge me to design the website but they require that I use their hosting service. They will design a custom website, set up everything like the shopping cart (they use their own which have all the bells and whistles that I need) and forum and all the website features that I want. Plus they claim to use a powerful SEO software and also to do the website maintenance which is how they they justify their $99 fees per month (so that would be for hsoting, maintenance and whatever problems I can encounter).

So here are my questions:

1) is it worth it to be required to use a hosting service, it seems to me that I won't really own the website. What if they go out of business. $99 a month seems pretty expensive, or not really?

2) In the other hand, what about maintenance, does an ecommerce need a lot of maintenance, who would take care of it if I use option 1. What about putting everything together (shopping cart, forum, merchant account...)

3) option 2 claim to offer a powerful SEO, which, if it is true might worth the money, but how can I be sure? maybe I better do some of the job myself and hire a SEO consultant in the future if I need it?

3) My last question is not directly related, but any clarification would be helpful. I want to be able to ad product pages myself, update and edit them. How does it work? Will I have to use software for this, if so, is there a lot of different one out there to choose from; or are the update/ edit web based?

Sorry, those might sound like dumb questions, but any help would help me tremendously.

Thanks,

Stephane