eCommerce & Affiliates Made Easy with iWeb ‘08
With the advent of iLife ‘08, and in particular the newest version of iWeb, it has become a lot easier to build an ecommerce site.
Until now you had to use tools such as iWebMore and iWeb Enhancer to add snippets of HTML code, which even then had to be post-processed after generating the site and publishing it to a folder, before then finally pushing it up to yor web server.
Now, thankfully, Apple has built some major enhancements that enables users to easily drop HTML code straight into the page and provide the additional functionality required to allow web site visitors to find what they want or to buy directly off of your iWeb created site.
Getting Started & What You Need To Know
Due to the way iWeb is designed, and because of the way that code snippets are frequently served up these days, usually in textareas, so as to avoid breaking the code during a copy and paste action, a minimal amount, if any knowledge is required about HTML and designing web pages at a low level by the end user.
In essence all you need to know is what result you expect from the code you are dropping into the iWeb template, and verifying that the end result is in fact achieved once the code is placed onto your web server, be that at mac.com or at some other third party web host. And with iPhoto on hand to import, edit and store your product images, or photos, dropping images and product descriptions into the web page are exceedingly simple.
Using PayPal or Google Checkout with iWeb
With services such as PayPal or Google Checkout, or merchant services such as 2Checkout, you can set up product buy buttons, recurring payment buttons and more for your site. The major advantage of using these payment processing services is that they all provide you with a checkout process, which avoids the hassle, from your perspective, of having to code that kind of functionality into your site - pretty much an impossibility with iWeb.
To get you started there are plenty of websites online for auto-generating code, that can be copied and pasted into iWeb. A quick search on Google brings up a few: PayPal Button Creator; PayPal Button Generator; and PayPal Button Factory. Once you have put in the requisite details and copied the code from the results produced int he respective text area on any of these sites you are read to paste it into iWeb.
Setting Up Online Advertising Such As Google AdSense for iWeb
If you are not a Google AdSense user, then signing up is pretty simple. Once you are ready and completely setup with an AdSense account you can drag and drop ad objects onto your page, and quickly and easily chose both formats and colors. For those of us who require a little more control and tweaking, you can always go the traditional route and, once logged in and looking at the AdSense homepage, start to build an ad campaign for your site by clicking on the "AdSense Setup" tab at the top of the page. This takes you through the necessary steps to create your embed code, which, when completed provides the said code ready for the copy and paste action.
Create and Display Amazon Links in iWeb
With an Amazon Associates account you can post affiliate links to Amazon products on your site, these products links can come in a wide range of forms, most recently contextual text links. Agai, much like with PayPal and Google’s AdSense, login to the Amazon Associates web site for yoru rspective locale, click "Build Links" in the left-hand menu and follow the instrctions until you have the embedable code you require
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Conclusion: As Easy As Pi …
Once you have the HTML code you require for embed you can paste it "right onto your web page via the HTML Snippet window in iWeb". You can then quite happily drag it anywhere on your page for final positioning, much like you would any other canvas object. It really is that simple, and takes out all of the cumbersome steps created by the need to use third party utilities for injecting HTML code into your iWeb pages in previous versions.
Also, if you can find third-party templates created specifically for the purpose of creating product listings with buttons, product description and other ecommerce-related elements well positioned on the site, then this would also be a definite plus and help in boosting your chances of doing brisk online trade.
