Adding a Shopping Cart??

I'm in the process of building a website for my mom's shop. I really have no experience at this what-so-ever. I have managed to figure out the website design through Word, however, I have no idea how to add a shopping cart. I've been looking around online, and it looks like I have to pay for a cart? Is this right, or is there a way that it can be done for free??

Firstly, DO NOT USE WORD TO MAKE WEBPAGES!!

It really sucks, you don't learn anything and the HTML is of a pretty poor standard, w3 standards that is.

With regards to carts, I believe you get them for free. If your webserver has PHP enabled, then go to somewhere like Hotscripts or phpresource index and have a look around.

There is also a recent thread somewhere on the devshed forms, so have a search here too.

Hope that helps a bit.

As was said , don't use word. It is not made to create web pages, you can save as a web page, but it is ugly.

example:
http://cyberosis.net/stuff/wordpage.htm

look at this page I just created in word, then right click on the page and choose
view source you will see that the code for this simple page is several pages long.

If you have Netscape on your computer,
it has a web page creator called composer that is pretty good.
You might have Front Page on your computer.
You can download NS Composer for free from Netscape.
Either one of them will let you create web pages in a format similar to Word.
type and drag and drop.

good luck,
robert

I forgot about the shopping cart.
Check with your web host company, often they have shopping carts available for free, otherwise do the search suggested for the free ones. If you are hosting your site on some free place you may not be able to use a shopping cart system there.

luck,
robert

never use word. it messes up your code, very hard to read. anyway, see your budget and check around for hosting companies offering free carts or not.

- You also have to see what db u want to use, SQL probably have to pay more for it, MS Access probably free.
- And also check what language you want to use; asp, php and etc...
- your target audience? small crowd or large. MS Access can't handle too many uses simultaneously.

cheers & good luck with yr shopping cart.

Well I just figured out what you all meant by Word not working well. I should have asked for help before I started!
I found a free shopping cart, hopefully I can figure out how to use it. We will probably have a small traffic flow on our site at first. But hopefully it will pick up in the future. \
It looks like I'm going to have to actually write some script for my cart. Is there a good site that has a tutorial or "the basics" for writing scripts?

There are a lot of free shoping carts out there - what language - PHP or ASP?

if you aren't sure how to even use html then using a free shopping cart and even attempting to install it would be like climbing Mt Everest.

There are free one's like Oscommerce, but I would imagine you would have terrible difficulty since there is no support and you probably will need it with you limited experience. Perhaps <edited> would be a choice since they have phone support.

FIRST, check with your hosting company. Most of them offer free shopping carts that they or you, can instal with a click of a button. then you just have to enter the products and other info.

The same ones you will find for free are the ones that your hosting company probably has available for free.
luck,
robert