Once upon a time, not so very long ago in fact, a business in the retail sector was just a shop, or a chain of shops perhaps. If you ran a company that sold things, you did so in a building with lots of shelves. Customers, meanwhile, would be those people who came into your shop, plucked items from said shelves, and queued up to pay for them. The whole process was expensive to start and to maintain, and restrictive in what it enabled you to do with your business. But it was also straightforward, with items physically placed around a space in order to sell them.

Today, the options are rather broader. Of course, you can still follow the shops-shelves route to retail success, but if you're starting out in business, if you've a great new idea that you're sure will make you some money, if there's a niche in the market you've noticed and plan on filling, there is a much cheaper and more versatile alternative. It is possible to run almost any kind of retail concern online at very little expense, and you can sell as little or as much as you need, in whatever manner you choose.

This, of course, is not a new idea. Consequently, the online marketplace for any and every line of business under the sun is highly congested, and it's important to make your business stand out. After all, the overwhelming majority of online shopping sessions involve customers who have a fair idea of what they're looking for; one cannot easily stumble on an enticing and novel online store in the same way that you would pass a number of different shops whilst walking down the high street or through the mall.

Indeed, you can imagine the online retailing world as a series of long streets, each of which has an array of shops all selling the same product. If you want shoes, you walk down the shoe street; if you want books, the book street is for you, and so on and so forth. Your online business would be in direct competition with businesses that aim to provide the same product or service, and the customer needs to be presented with something that pulls them through your (virtual) doors.

There are many companies that offer a website-building service for a business, but surely, the point of establishing your store online was not to have to spend a lot of money merely to get started; and indeed, there's a great deal that you can do yourself with a little patience and a little planning - and, most importantly, with a Big Idea.

One vital step is to think about what you want your front page to look like. This is what every passing customer will see first, and if it doesn't do its job, it's what every passing customer will see last, too. It ought to be simple, both in the sense of being easy to understand, and also in the demands it places on the visitor's computer.

Also, the site has to be appealing, in a manner that suits the product; a site selling comic books would use different colours and styles to an accountant, which would be different still to a company that provides bespoke funerals; it's always best to plan out how this will appear, and what colour and style schemes will suit your business, before setting out to create your site.

You'll need to consider how your customers will see your products - the pages that replace the shelves of a conventional store, with whatever descriptions, images and perhaps user comments you feel would best sell the goods or services you're offering. As a retailer, your site will also need to offer the customer an easy and clear search tool, intuitive and comprehensive links to navigate around the site, and a means to pay you.

This can easily start to appear rather complicated, particularly if you're not fluent in HTML, XML, Java and any other language you might require in building a site that will attract a healthy turnover. Fortunately, you can still build exactly the site you've imagined without the slightest knowledge of how these languages work. Adobe Dreamweaver is the market-leading WYSIWYG site designer - that is to say, you build your site visually, with an array of tools to create the site exactly as you intended it (and to check up, at the touch of a button, on exactly how it will appear to your customers).

With Dreamweaver, the plans you made for your site can be reproduced exactly as you intended on screen, complete with any dynamic or interactive content your site might benefit from - for example, your customers will certainly expect that search tool; you might find that flash animations or pop-up menus make your site more visually appealing; or you may want to automatically detect where your customer is in the world, so that they can see a version of the site tailored to their needs.

Most importantly, though, these and countless other tasks can be carried out with Dreamweaver without you entering, or understanding, a single line of code. However the page you create appears, whatever you put into it, the code will be produced automatically.

Of course, in order to be able to create whatever page you may be imagining, in order to be versatile enough for any demands, Dreamweaver has a vast array of options and tools for every purpose. It would make sense, then, to take a short training course to familiarise yourself with the software, so that you can start pulling customers through the virtual doors of your online store.