E-Commerce Adventure

I've wanted to create an e-commerce site for awhile, but when I first started out, I couldn't fathom the difficulty of programming a website (even if made from a template). Thus, here is a running journal of my progress. Ahem...the journey of a programmer who doesn't really program:

December 2011: 
Began working on osCommerce (newest build), but it was so buggy that I couldn't even get into the installation portion. I downloaded an older version and figured out how to fix the installation part, but there were admin panel errors that wouldn't go away. Frustrated, I trashed the entire project and vowed to begin anew in 2012.

January 2012:
Started to research other open source e-commerce sites in mid-January. I was mostly impressed with the amount of features within Prestashop, so I tried to download that. The program had over 5,000 files and took forever to unzip! Also, the store did not install properly. I tried an autoinstaller on my web server, but there were errors - also ended up trashing Prestashop. I tried Magento (super clean design, as I saw on their website) and it was the first program that worked. Funnily enough, I found out later that where I installed the site and where I thought I installed the site...did not coincide - which was probably one reason Prestashop did not work properly. Here are some updates:

• 1/24: Got familiar with the site and tested out the product page. Began refining the "Contact Us" link.
• 1/25: Completed the "Contact Us" form (for the time being)...and it works =D...but it took 1-2 hours to figure out. Designed a simple logo and favicon (HAAAA, awesome). Revised the header and footer.
• 1/29: I did a full restore of the site (started from scratch). It was strange because my address had a subdomain that I had not set...and it was superannoying. Example: mysite.com/default.
• 1/31: Good progress made today (2 hours of work)! Loaded products into my catalog with descriptions (to be revised later). Navigation (top navigation bar and site map) was automatically created when stock inventory was set to 1.

February 2012: 
I finished the frontend design for the website!!! It's super simple, but clean - pretty good for not knowing PHP (and most programming languages). I spent 1/3 of the month tweaking the look and feel of the website (adding content for most of the pages), 1/3 of the month updating the product catalog, and 1/3 of the month scouring forums for hints on managing the ordering system. At first, I tested the ordering system using Paypal Sandbox, but I wasn't able to log in from the site, so I used a real-time solution instead. I created a test product worth $0.01 and bought the item so that I could go through the entire process from the customer's perspective. After figuring out where to find email templates, I edited them and re-tested the email functions. Though the customer sales emails didn't work at first, another few days of scavenging led me to the solution (hint: use customer service emails hosted by one's own domain). March will be a month of SEO implementation and Internet marketing madness. I'm also looking forward to populating my product inventory with more goodies =D...and documenting the entire process of growth.

Looking back, Magento is not the most intuitive e-commerce solution out there, but it surely has the cleanest interface that I've seen thus far. While setting up my page, I had problems with email messaging and finding out where each of the files were located, among other basic necessities.