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Well ... after a day stuck in a shopping cart it's good to come up for some air and see that there really is life out there after all.

If you have never looked at shopping carts before I can tell you there are some good ones out there but they all have their issues. Of course there are the well-known ones like Zencart that have been around for years but that takes a while to set up and the learning curve for someone who is only just computer literate is steep to say the least.

Then there are a couple that have been built for WordPress and other content management systems. They aren't so hard to set up until you run into an issue that no one else seems to have encountered ... and then they're a dog. And that's where I?ve been for the last day or so ... trying to turn a dog into something that's a little easier to use.

It has been time-consuming and downright wasteful.

About the only thing that kept me working on it was the thought that the client we're building this online shop for will find it much easier to use than Zencart and in this case that's a big plus for me. While I don't mind clients calling us for help with their online shops there are some people I would rather not hear from so the easier I can make it for them the less likely they are to call.

So how easy to use are the programs that you're using? Can you do a lot of work in a short period of time or do you have to spend hours building just one free site?

I know of one guy who runs over 600 websites and manages to keep them all updated and pulling in the surfers. How does he do it?

Before we think about that just stop and think about how much time it would take you to do that with the software you're using right now ... could you do it with what you've got?

If you can't then perhaps it's time to start thinking about what you need so that you can do something similar to the 600-sites guy because that's where this industry has already gone and if your still struggling with one site at a time then you've got some serious problems.

So what would he need to be able to keep that many sites updated? Obviously you?re going to need some fairly interesting scripts to not only do all the repetitive tasks but to do them seamlessly so that you're not wasting time manually moving things from one process to another.

Take images for example. Many people when they just start out process one image at a time ... reducing image size and file size and at the same time making sure that there is still some quality left in the finished product. They then have to reduce each image so that they have a thumbnail and then they upload them and manually insert images into the web page.

It's time consuming and that's a shameful waste because your time is too valuable to waste on images. Instead you need to be able to batch process the images to a smaller size, thumbnail them and rename them as you go.

While there are a number of scripts out there that will batch process your images to a smaller size and then batch them again for thumbnails ... just as soon as you start the thumbnail process ... wouldn't it be better if you find one that ran them twice and maybe even then uploaded them for you with just one press of the 'Enter' key?

And while you're thinking about some ways to save time with the images why aren't you thinking about some faster way of adding your marketing message? Why not look at some way of inserting banners and text marketing into your websites without even having to open up each website?

Has anyone written any scripts that will do any of those things? Perhaps you should look around and see what is out there these days.

You may find exactly what you're looking for ... or you may find that you have to get someone to do some coding from scratch or maybe modify an pre-existing script ... but if you can get it done just think of the potential sales revenue that all those extra sites could be generating.

If that guy with over 600 sites is only getting one sale a week from each site he?s still making some nice money so why are you still here building one site at a time? Shouldn't you be out there looking for the tools that will help you work a hell of a lot smarter.