Anyone who’s been working online experiences severe bouts of “put up a site and never touch it again” :)…..I’m kidding of course, however, sometimes it becomes difficult to get motivated and go back to update older sites.

I’ve got some really old sites that need to major remodeling and I’ve been procrastinating severely!

The reason is because they are static sites and I want to either convert them to wordpress sites or I want to turn it into a wordpress site. Those really are 2 different tasks. The first instance, I would have to take all exsiting pages and turn them into either wordpress pages or wordpress posts. In the second case, I would leave the existing static site intact and add a wordpress blog, any further additions to the site would be done through the worpdress blog.

One site I want to turn into a membership site and I’ve been researching solutions for turning a wordpress blog into a membership site. It’s amazing how many wordpress membership plugins have entered the scene in the last year….some expensive and all encompassing and some simple and cheap. It’s important to keep in mind the ultimate purpose of the membership. Simple membership sites known as Micro-Memberships are easy to set up and run with the right system and if you use wordpress with a membership plugin….setting up and maintaining these micro memberships becomes very easy. So….my goal is to turn a couple of my sites into these micro membership sites and see what happens.

I have another site with tons of ebooks, videos, smallreports and a variety of other eproducts. I wanted to turn it into a type of directory site that I’m sure you’ve seen, however, I wanted to take advantage of wordpress’s seo capabilities and easy managment, so, I’ve been looking for an ecommerce plugin that would work specifically with digital downloads. I think I found one at Tips and Tricks HQ….in fact you should visit the site because you’ll find a variety of good and free stuff, but they have a very nice eCommerce Plugin for Digital Products that I’m anxious to try out.

My other project is to turn an exsiting static hodgepodge site into a ecommerce site. This becomes a priority because it’s my wife’s site and someting I’ve been promising to do for a long time. Liz is an artist and paints glassware. So the site sells hand painted glasses of various types and other one off art pieces. There’s a shopping cart on the site now that uses paypal, however it is very archaic and shipping and handling charges are a real pain….besides all that the site was one of my first and now looks horrible!

So….I really need to spruce it up and work and getting some traffic to the site. WordPress is my best option and there are a ton of WordPress ecommerce themes or storefront type themes. In fact, the options that are available today for creating a storefront or ecommerce site with wordpress are absolutely staggering. I’ve been researching the best method of creating a storefront or just a site that I can sell a few products with for the last month and it seems as though wordpress is a given but the selection of a specific method of creating the ecommerce site is mind numbing.

So, as I go on with my research I’ve decided to compile a list of resources and recommend what I think to be the best solutions to:

• ecommerce with wordpress
• digital store plugin
• storefront with wordpress
• directory type site with wordpress
• membership site with wordpress

Right now I’m leaning toward a WP plugin from Tips and Tricks HQ called WP eStore Plugin for the digital store, it has everything I need. Integration with Aweber, built in shopping cart, instant delivery and security for eproducts, easy checkout, integration with eMember Plugin, integration with NextGen Gallery for digital images, and a whole lot more. I’ll keep track of my progress as I move forward with the selection of these plugins and let you know how they work…..so keep tuned!

As far as Liz’s site that sells physical products, I’m not sure yet. The Market Theme is an ecommerce storefront theme with shopping cart, everything is built in and looks very nice. They have some nice example sites. There’s another theme and shopping cart combination that I just found at Shopperpress.com, it offers even more, though I still need to investigate.

When remodeling any website I would caution you not to just jump into the first thing that looks good. Do your due diligence and make sure your research is good. Changing an existing ecommerce site or creating a new one is not a process you want to go through twice…..especially after pages get spidered and indexed.