How to Build a Photo eCommerce Website With Individual Accounts

E-commerce photo websites offer convenience to customers.

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An e-commerce website sells products online, and many smaller sites utilize an e-commerce platform that stores their data on the network's servers. Although the data resides on the provider's network, the website owner maintains ownership of the content and can edit the information through a Web-based interface. Photo e-commerce websites with individual accounts include mini-pages within the site that deliver static and dynamic content, e-commerce widgets to facilitate ordering and payment, and applications to promote interaction with the target audience.

Navigate to the website of a photo-publishing platform that offers templates, widgets and other Web elements geared to e-commerce websites. Create a new account. Typically, this requires entering information such as your business name and tax ID number. Most photo-publishing platforms offer Flash media templates and galleries to display content.

Create mini-pages within your e-commerce site. Mini-pages divide static and dynamic content. Static content refers to media provided directly from the server, while dynamic content refers to media created “on the fly” by an application such as Flash. Use mini-pages to create dedicated pages for a gallery, a description, a title and other information relevant to your photos but separate from the static content stored in HTML pages on the server.

Add your photos. Upload images stored on your computer or media drive, or import them from your photo website using your browser. E-commerce photo sites offer several options for displaying photos, such as galleries, splash pages and clip art pages. Many of these sites also allow you to edit the photos after you've uploaded them.

Set up an e-commerce shopping widget. Shopping widgets allow you to design a virtual shopping cart and customize it with skins and other graphic overlays. Some widgets allow you to manage labels, pricing, descriptions and images displayed to the customer.

Install widgets that encourage interaction between customers and your website. Widgets commonly offered on e-commerce photo sites include RSS feeds, visitor counters, payment options and contact forms. You can also mix music players and comment boxes with your photos.

Add static and dynamic effects to photos on your e-commerce website. Static effects include color, opacity, watermarks and transparency overlays; dynamic effects include blurring, image warping and image movement, such as expansion, rotation and pixilation.

Add text to your Web pages to improve search engine optimization. SEO can improve your website’s visibility in search engines. Adding strategically placed keywords within your e-commerce website increases its search engine rankings, which means increased traffic to your site. Effective keywords include the terms a potential customer might type in a search query when looking for the type of photos you sell. Make sure your keywords are relevant to the content of your site. Your photo e-commerce site should have at least 400 words on the homepage, keywords integrated in the headers of each page, and links to Web pages that showcase your photos.

Jkalal Assar's work has appeared in magazines such as "Food & Wine," "Gourmet" and "Wine Spectator." He is a graduate of the Le Cordon Bleu College of Culinary Arts and has cooked professionally in Paris, New York and Las Vegas. Assar also holds an Associate of Science in information technology from Marshall University.