Help a friend with his e-commerce

Hey everyone, I just got an email from a good friend who is asking for my advice on the best way to get his company on the web. The problem is that I don't know diddly-squat about this type of stuff above and beyond HTML and Flash, but I don't want to look bad to my friend because I want to hopefully help out and make some money :D Anyways, here is his email:

Quote:

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"BTW, I am stuck with indecision. We have a couple of domain names,
ksupply.biz and kelloggsupply.com. We want to put up a basic web site. Our
goal initially is to get reliable email hosting and move in baby steps to
develop a lite ecommerce site and test the waters. Nothing to fancy and
expensive.

I have never learned html and really don't want to spend lots of time
initially creating the site. More like point and click development.

There are soooo many different hosting companies and options out there it is
difficult to know where to start.

What tools should I look at to get the site built?
Any knowledge as to what type of shopping cart software I should look at?
I know that when we start down that road one of the biggest considerations
will be the easy of updates to the product database.

Got any suggestions regarding this?

Any pointers would be appreciated.

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Anyone have an idea as to what I should tell him?

If he doesn't really want to code anything himself, he could always look at:

Macromedia Dreamweaver

or browse about for a free WYSIWYG HTML editor.

What about creating a shopping cart? Its hard to tell through searches what is good and what isn't without actually giving them all a try...

Point n' Click development is a comical statement - a website consisting of many pages - there is no such thing.

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Beyond that, I believe that Cprog is hosted with www.liquidweb.com which is what I am also using. They give you 2 different shopping cart systems that you can setup. However, if u want to accept credit cards in real-time, you need to find a CC processing company.

>>> Point n' Click development is a comical statement

I think that's a bit strong. It is quite possible to make simple web sites with point and clickers - some of our friends are very far from programmers, but have built web sites, (with numerous pages), using these tools, (I think they used FrontPage not DreamWeaver, there are several and most offer the same features).

>>> What about creating a shopping cart?

Those that I know are written in perl. That is not really a point and click thing to write, but, and it's a big but, there are many sources where you can buy "off the shelf" web shops.

Okay, thanks for the help guys. I found a few sites I can direct him to, and I'll suggest that he looks at both Dreamweaver and FrontPage - and of course offer to help out programming anything he can't do point-n-click ;)

I believe yahoo offers some shopping cart options. You may want to refer him to them.