High hopes for building a "snazzy store fast" per your home page advert. Bought a package of coffeecup software a year or more ago. Have dabbled with Visual Site Designer many times with varied yet mostly little progress. Have been using MS Publisher thus far. Want to bring web presence to be more engaging and hopefully profitable. Keep struggling with unfamiliarity of VSD (not psyched about the available themes. Wondering if I should try a different approach or try a different system (looking into MS Web Matrix and possibly hiring this out. Yet, I believe I can build it myself with the hundreds of dollars I already invested in coffeecup products.

Would you be willing to share some advice and guidance? Any help will be greatly appreciated. Thank you.
Walt

If you're looking to do a store why are you trying to use VSD for it? Do you have the Shopping Cart Creator Pro and Shopping Cart Designer Pro programs? What type of store are you looking to do? More information would help to know what to suggest for you.

Walt. We have an Ambassador Viv who has successfully combined VSD with the Shopping Cart pair.
I suggest you ask questions in the Visual Site Designer forum. I am sure he will reply.

His approach is to create pages in VSD to describe what he has for sale in his shop. He always says he does not know coding but if you see what he has achieved you will be amazed. The VSD produced pages link to and from the Shop created ones.

I will state now you will not be left out to dry and you will get help. You did not mention the products but I think that pretty impressive Avatar does. The available themes can be fine tuned to suit your requirement.

You seem to have the imaging skills to add to the presentation. Go as far as you can then ask questions.

Combining VSD and the Shop or the shop with any other HTML site is something that is done via the menu in VSD and the Shop Tools area of the Shopping Cart Programs which isn't too hard. You can easily add products to your external site too by grabbing the links for them from the shop pages once you have them uploaded.

No real need for an external site though if you're just wanting a shop. It's a preference thing and depends on how many pages you want for your site/shop. The Shopping Cart programs have a possible 5 extra pages you can add so you can do pretty well with those, but can always do more with extra site setups outside of the program as mentioned by Prism and with the info above.

In the end it all depends on what type of shop you need. If it's fertilizer, then I'm sure that the Shopping Cart Creator Pro and Designer Pro will work fine for your needs.

Take them both for a trial spin and see how you get along with them and let us know