England’s World Cup Glory is a combined blog and store targetted at England Supporters for the duration of the World Cup. It carries a small number of England-branded, football-related merchandise for fans to show their national pride.

To be honest, I wish I’d launched this a month or so ago - and not waited until an hour before England’s first match to start building the site! I had toyed with the idea of doing something around the World Cup, but didn’t find the time or motivation. In the end it was the endless talking-up of England’s chances in the tournament that motivated me to put something together. Boy did I get it done quick!

A online store needs stock. Thankfully I was already sorted on that front. Last year I became an agent for a UK-based dropshipping service (this was when I was hoping to make stacks of cash off of eBay). This service were currently promoting a nice line of England Fan Merchandise that would be perfect for my venture. If you’re not sure what dropshipping is, I’ll be writing an entry on it in the near future so look out for it!

First step was the domain name. One media “pundit” had mentioned “England’s World Cup Glory” in his commentary. That sounded perfect to me so I checked if it was available. The .com address for englandsworldcupglory was available so naturally I jumped on it. Total cost was $8.88 and 5 minutes.

Next was hosting. I could have used my existing Textdrive account, but I wanted to add another host to my portfolio so I could diversify my I.P. ranges when linking between my sites. It also meant that not all my eggs would be in one basket, as it were. There are a million hosts out there, but I’ve heard really good things about Dreamhost. 10 minutes later I was signed up for a year on their $9.95 plan (it saved $50 on setup costs and I saved more when a friend gave me a promo code for $90) and the domain was pointed to their DNS servers. So far, so good - and the big match hadn’t even kicked off yet! As a treat to Get Rich Project readers, sign up to Dreamhost with the promo code GETRICH47 to save $47 dollars on your order.

Not being too familiar with eCommerce software in general, I decided to stick with what I know and use Wordpress combined with Paypal. I created a series of encrypted Paypal “Buy Now” buttons and inserted them into entries describing the various products I was selling. I also wrote a couple of blog entries for the site and the various other pages I would need. All I had left to do was create a Wordpress theme which was fit-for-purpose. This would take the longest of the development process. I didn’t want to start getting into pretty, graphical, designs for now; speed and simplicity were my goal.

The theme was prototyped on my local development setup over the rest of the afternoon, before stopping at dinner time to spend the evening with my family. Once everyone was tucked up in bed I returned to work. A little bit of tweaking later and the theme was put live. After fixing a few bugs that cropped up, it was time to go to bed. Total time spent building the site - 6-8 hours or so. Not bad for someone who has been known to take weeks tweaking a single page on some projects.

Today I will spend a few hours promoting the website and spend the rest of the day enjoying the sunshine and the football!