Open source E-Commerce packages offer great value for money (free!), but do you have the technical know-how to set one up?

E-Commerce is a tricky business, not only do you need an attractive design to capture your prospects, a competitve product and good SEM, but you also need to consider how the backoffice is going to work and does it fit in with your business model and is there room to expand once your website becomes successful.

Before looking at an Open source solution, ask yourself these questions;

1. Do I know HTML / CSS ?
2. Do I have a working knowledge of PHP / ASP ?
3. Do I have a working knowledge of MySQL ?
4. Do I understand how payment gateways work ?
5. Can I commit 20+ hours of my time to setup the software ?

If you answered no to any of these questions, it means you will most likely run into headaches using opensource solutions. By default an out of the box / vanilla package will have very minimal styling and design and functionality.. While plenty of help is available on support forums, most of the solutions require you to understand at least some coding concepts.

Professional help is always available and there are many agencies that will happily install and setup these e-commerce solutions for you. However understand that they under no obligation to upgrade / maintain / patch the software once it has been installed. Some will also offer templates that can help improve the design, if you are on a budget this may be a good way to save time and headaches.

Presented below is a list of Open source e-commerce packages and reviews which you will find helpful in your search.

• OsCommerce - OsCommerce Review (Webbys Choice)
• ZenCart - ZenCart Review
• Magento - Magento Review
• dashCommerce - dashCommerce Features
• CubeCart - Cube Cart vs. Zen Cart review
• VirtueMart / Joomla extension - VirtueMart Review

Everybody loves freebies, so here is a list of free web design icons to help you gloss up your designs.

Most of these icons are under GNU liscense agreement, please read the documentation before using them in your commercial projects.

• iMac Icons - E-Mail icons, Chart icons, Mac folder icons
• Toolbar Icons by Matt Ball - simple but elegant icons
• 60 detailed vector icons in EPS format (Webbys Choice)
• 128 Function Icon Set (48×48px only)

Make your design stand out with shadows and use of lights.

3 Photoshop tutorials - creating a subtle and elegant shadow effect using one or more light source. When used sparing in web design, shadows and highlights can turn a boring one dimension website into a polished interactive website.

• Using Gradients to Make Light and Shadow
• Feathering Gradients in Photoshop
• Light and shadow in Photoshop (Webbys Choice)

Position a div element absolute and align it top center using CSS

Find out how to absolute position a div on a centre aligned web design layout. This tip is useful to position html over images or in webby's case, our header message positioned over the header..

#headerInside {
position: absolute;
top: 0px;
left: 50%; /* aligns the DIV in the center */
width: 1000px; /* width of your main container */
margin-left: -500px; /* position relative to centre */
}