well, here we are in the 21st century. I had never thought about building my own online store. I had always just attached shopping with the high street and shopping malls. I have a music shop in the high street and lots of loyal customers.

Quite a few of them had asked me for the web address to my online store. That is when it occurred to me, that I could gain extra business that way. Any qualms that I had about it being tricky were soon put to the side when i researched it online.

One of my friends recommend a organization that had built their on-line store so I decided to give them a ring. I hoped that they would not use technical terms as I really would not comprehend what they were talking about. However, I was pleasingly surprised, not only that they were impressively friendly, but that they actually spoke English, and I understood what they were saying!

They asked numerous questions about what I was looking for with my online shop, what my aims were, who my expected market was and about my current branding. These weren't the technological questions I was expecting, but questions about running a shop – which I was quite easy with. I jotted various thoughts down on an email and they went through each one of them with me. As time went on, my nervous thoughts disappeared and were overcome by excitement.

It seemed like next to no time before they announced that my on-line store was ready. I was a great deal excited, and typed in the address straight away. I was so impressed and on cloud nine with the result. The store looked professional and new. I browsed through the store as if I was a customer and found the whole shopping experience pleasurable. I also liked the fact that they had implemented certain safety procedures so my customers details would be kept protected.

One of the aspects that the company discussed with me is optimisation for the search engines. After all, it was better to gain internet traffic from as various sources as possible. The company really had thought of everything and each individual page had separate seo techniques installed into it.

So now my online store is up and running, and my customers are happy. I am even getting orders from individuals living in other towns and this never happened with my high street store. The next challenge though is to continue the search engine optimization (SEO) process, because it's not just something that's built in to a website and left – it's an on-going process. A little like swimming I guess – getting to the surface is fantastic news if you don't have gills, but you have to keep paddling to stay there.