Ecomm Challenge Day 8 — Budget allocation
This could be the shortest article yet!
With just £100 to spend, it doesn’t allow me much leeway or scope to get carried away with tech. In my introductory article I allowed myself to use my existing hosting account, but I still need to get a domain, decide on a theme, install a theme buy an SSL Certificate, and finalised my commerce solution. In addition I need to reserve some money for marketing and building an engaged audience.
Here’s my budget:
There might be a couple of mitigations I can undertake to bring these costs down but in reality I’m going to have to be very adaptable to make it work on this budge.
Domain
My first port of call is my hosting service is TSO Host (affiliate link), I’m lucky as I already have a cloud hosting account which allows me to host up to 100 domains with 100gb of web space. I host a couple of my friends websites (for free), as well as having a range of my own portfolio sites and a content site.
I this point I should mention that I have a small domain purchasing addiction. When out with mates discussing an idea, I have been known to purchase the odd domain or twelve! It occurred to me that rather than buying another bespoke domain for this project I could use one I already own, if I can find one that fits the purpose. To my surprise the last one in my list on page 2, looks like it could actually work:
I quite like the idea and saving at least £12 for a .co.uk means I can reallocate to marketing.
Wordpress Theme
I’ve bought a fair few themes of over the years some of them good and some of them not so good. As I’ve built and tweaked more sites, I have learnt what to look for in a theme and more importantly what to avoid. In my experience it is quite often it is worth paying a little bit more for one that has a bit more functionality, rather than scrimping and finding out you need to do a lot of bespoke work to make it work correctly. But I only have £100, if I could save £45, that is a large part of my budget…
So I decide to spend an hour setting up the domain I’ve got and check out some free e-commerce based themes. These are the themes that I tested:
On closer inspection I’m not so sure that they are going to work. They have some of the settings I was hoping for but they don’t look as clean as I had hoped:
Maybe I do need a paid for theme, but I’m going to defer finding one until I have sorted out my SSL Certificate.
SSL Certificate
What is an SSL Certificate?
Transport Layer Security (TLS) and its predecessor, Secure Sockets Layer (SSL), both frequently referred to as “SSL”, are cryptographic protocols that provide communications security over a computer network.[1] Several versions of the protocols find widespread use in applications such as web browsing, email, Internet faxing, instant messaging, and voice-over-IP (VoIP). Websites are able to use TLS to secure all communications between their servers and web browsers. — Wikipedia
Why do I need one for my site?
Although I may not process payments directly, I haven’t decided on final payments gateways, it is likely that I will hold login in data for users so that I can re-market to them in which case I should have an SSL Certificate. WooCommerce have a very useful introductory article about SSL as well as a more detailed how to reference article.
I look at the easiest way of installing an SSL through my hosting provider and I’m a little agog at their pricing:
This will take me way over budget:
I decided to double check my hosting benefits and found that I have Let’s Encrypt SSL Support, which is a free service and Let’s Encrypt is also free!
Luckily they have a wiki I can follow, to walk through the process. It is relatively simple if you have a vague idea of what you are doing and are not applying it to an existing site that has content, as that would involve re-writes on all your hosted image files. For about 20 minutes work, it is worth it to see this in my browser bar:
Having saved myself £50 on SSLs I feel like I could justify going for a paid theme now:
I do a bit of Googling and then head over to Theme Forest (affiliate link) to checkout some themes. After half an hour of checking out the live demos of themes I have a shortlist of theme that match my requirements. I’d be interested to hear which of the following themes appeal to you:
I’ll reveal which one I actually bought in tomorrow’s post…
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