The purpose of this post is to provide a basic guide on what are the elements necessary to start up a basic store....Please let me know if I have missed anything! Or if I am completely off track ;-)

Creating the Designs

* Home Page Design.
* Product Category Page Design.
* Product Detail Page Design.
* Generic Content Page Design (Used for general pages, such as about us or articles/press releases)
* Checkout Page Design.
* Contact Us Page Design.

Slicing up the Designs

This step involves converting the designs to xhtml/css tableless layouts. Makes for a cleaner site, and helps with SEO as well.

Creating the Master Pages for BVC5

Using the css/xhtml files from the previous step we can now create the master pages and any other pages necessary to integrate into BVC5.

Loading products and populating informational pages

Basically configuring and populating BVC5, and integrating to a payment gateway.

Launch Site and begin website marketing

Perform a basic check that you are doing the following....

i) Using URL Rewriting
ii) Using the correct heading tags for your pages i.e (H1, H2, H3)
iii) Internal linking - linking related pages together such as related products.
iv) Using the correct title tags for each of your pages i.e ,<title>Purple Widget</title>
v) Using a tracking tool such as Google Analytics.
vi) Creating a Google Sitemap.

Begin search engine marketing. For those of you who are unfamiliar with Search Engine Marketing I recommend you read the following article by SEOmoz - http://www.seomoz.org/article/b...arch-engine-optimization

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In summary the purpose of this post is to help people get a general overview of what elements are needed to launch a BVC5 store, without getting too technical. Anything that I have missed please feel free to add comments/suggestions.

Thanks

Richard