Anyone who has an idea for an online business, or at least one with an online component, doesn't have long before they come across an important question. What's the best way to create an ecommerce website? The answer is fairly straightforward, but in order for it to have credibility, we need to first look at what eCommerce entails in order to understand why the answer is correct.

Everybody is frantically spending inordinate amounts of time and effort in order to capture and hold on to their most prized keywords and phrases. Everywhere you look, you'll see companies promising to lift your website to the top page for any keyword (clearly a bit of false advertising for all but a maximum of ten of their clients). People are spending good money to get to the front page... but why?

I speak to people on a regular basis about how they can obtain a suitable web presence for their business or startup. The overwhelming request I get is to explain exactly what they need in order to get their website up and running. This doesn't really have a simple answer because what is required depends on the business' requirements. To make matters slightly more complicated, what the business requires now may not be what is required six months or two years down the line. So defining the web requirements for a new business is not always an elementary job.

If you have just completed a website and are thinking about putting your feet up and taking a break, perhaps hold that thought for a little while longer. As time consuming and redundant as it may seem, it is absolutely critical that you run a battery of tests to ensure that your website is free of serious errors and robust enough to take care of itself. You've checked all your web pages in three or four different browsers, right?

Here's a short checklist of the main things you need to look out for:

It can be quite tricky to find exactly the right hosting service. It's important to find one that suits you and the requirements of your website. There are plenty of good services out there, but unfortunately, there are even more poor ones. Separating the wheat from the chaff is something everyone has to do on their first time around. Fortunately, there are a number of ways to increase the chances of finding the right hosting service.

Here's a list of things you need in order to run a website:

While Drupal is, on aggregate, one of the best web platforms around, there's always room for improvement. Drupal 6 has one fairly important failing when it comes to files and file handling. During site configuration you are required to decide whether or not files are downloadable directly by the public or whether Drupal should maintain control of the downloads. This is/was a fairly inflexible system and one that led to further problems down the line...

At some stage almost everyone running a website based on Drupal will find that they want to add a view somewhere on the site where it can't easily be done. Most often, views can be added to blocks to accompany content types or pages and the block visibility rules can be used to tweak who gets to see the view and when. Views can easily be added to panel pages, and most have their own dedicated page anyway. Despite all this, you might still need to know how to add a view manually...

Being able to accurately control the size and dimensions of images is vital for any modern website. Nowdays, different media types are commonplace because broadband has become ubiquitous. Because of this, websites have the opportunity to show off far superior and more interesting pages to the average visitor. But being able to handle images on the fly is not something that is necessarily too easy to do - unless you have a well designed web platform.

The importance of blogging cannot be overstated when it comes to building a business online. Entrepreneurs and startups should all build time into their daily/weekly routine in order to create valuable informative content (or at least content of interest). Even if it is not your aim to build up a base of loyal readers and generate income from them, it doesn't mean you can skimp on blogging. Regular fresh content, is the lifeblood of any succesful web presence...

Standard drupal content types can be quite flexible. It's easy to add new fields of various kinds ranging from integers, urls and text, to node references and user references. Fundamentally though, there comes a point where a given page needs more than a single piece of content - no matter how spiffy said content is.

Look at any content driven site such as news or article websites and, almost without exception, they'll have regions showing different bits of content on their landing page. It's easy to mimic this with your own Drupal website, no programming required - all you need is the Panels module.