Opening an Online Store: Creating a Website with HTML

Like many others I am an HTML flunky and could not create a web-page to save my life. The only way I can create a web page of any sort is by using a pre-made template - and honestly I don't want my site to look like someone else's. This poses a particular problem when opening a web store where you want (and need) to make it stand out from the competition. Because I want any online store I open to be different than everyone else's I have done hours and hours of reading and research in the hopes that somehow, someway, I may eventually understand. Honestly, I should have spent those hours on something else - maybe one day I will understand it, it just won't be today. One of the stores I am working on is through Printfection and the templates are okay, but they are really nothing to rave about. After more searching I found the perfect website for those who do not know how to work with HTML. The site is called TeePlates Themer located at http://themer.australele.com/index.php.

First I would like to mention that this site is completely free, which is always a bonus. It walks you through the creation of a web-page for Printfection from start to finish. The tutorials were amazing as they were broken down into sections and were in video format so you could actually see what you needed to do rather than try and decipher a text description. Creating a web-page is extremely easy because all you have to do is select what you want from an option menu. And you could see what your page looked like while you were constructing it which was a feature I loved. This way I could see what changes I was making during the page creation rather than waiting until the end and then realizing I didn't like or needed to change the design. Even though I am an HTML failure, I did attempt to piece a site together using a standard template generator - and it was the ugliest thing I had ever seen. TeePlates Themer allowed me to create a web-page that I was proud of for the very first time. Granted, it is not anything really fancy but it gave me the ability to make my store my own instead of one with a cookie cutter template.

The only disadvantage to the site was that it was set up specifically for Printfection with the logo included on the page, which was a slight disappointment since I would have liked to have used it for other applications that used HTML. But at the same time, it allows you to see your changes and then you can look to see how the HTML has changed. This is how I started to learn HTML, and now have a very minimal understanding of it. If you use the tool carefully and watch the changes it makes you will be able to work on changing the HTML codes on other sites you are working on.

Overall, this is a great site. You can build a custom web page and even use it as a tool to learn HTML. It gave me the starting foundation for the development of my web store. Hopefully you will be able to use TeePlates Themer to create your own site and use it to get a basic understanding of HTML too.