Embarking On an eCommerce Adventure

Hi, I'm Phil, welcome to my new blog and cheers for stopping by!
If you're reading this then one of the following statements is quite probably true:

1) I told you about my blog and you're checking it out just because I asked you to, in a feeble attempt to increase my hits, or,
2) You are actually trying to achieve exactly what I'm trying to achieve.

'Hold on, just what the hell ARE you trying to achieve?', I hear you cry. It's not that long of a story really... To sum it up, I am trying to develop a fully operational eCommerce store, myself, from scratch. At this point it's just a personal project rather than a money making enterprise, but you never know what the future may hold.

'Why the hell are you blogging about that?' - Yes, fair question, and even fairer an explanation. I'm blogging it because I intend to reveal the trade secrets, things that the pro-developers out there don't want you to know, so that they can continue charging for services that people can provide for themselves if they put their minds to it.

The Internet is packed full of downloadable eCommerce solutions, some better than others, but none of the free ones have the exact functionality I require. Almost without exception, you are asked to pay a fee to unlock the decent features. This is FAIR ENOUGH, they put the effort in so they deserve their dosh, but I'm going to do this and I'm not going to pay for it. I consider it a test, and it's going to be a fun learning curve from which I will acquire real, appliable skills.

The Project:
This test project is going to be an art gallery that sells it's paintings. Essentially it needs to display the paintings as thumbnails and allow the user to see a full scale version if they so wish. They then need to be able to add a painting to their basket, then either go back to look at more paintings or go ahead and buy what's in the basket.
They will also need to be able to view their basket at any point during their visit and remove an item if they want.

At this point, I do not intend to have stock levels controlled via a database. I am assuming the gallery will created the paintings 'to order', rather than hold stock, just for simplicities sake.

Once this level of functionality has been reached, I will need to investigate ways of processing the customer payments for the orders. Initially, I'm thinking of PayPal as I know it's easy to integrate and it quite cheap from a shop owners point of view. On the other hand, I'm a bit of a Google fanboy, so I will also consider the new GoogleCheckout system if it's cheaper and easier to integrate.

At this point, I do not know whether I will develop the eCommerce application in ASP, PHP, or whateverscript. However, there are certain (I'm a glutton for punishment) limitations.

Limitations:
Costs must be as low as possible.
The site must be coded in W3C standard compliant HTML and CSS
The site must be designed with accessibility in mind.

The Plan:
First I will knock up a few sketches on paper of what the site should roughly look like, and try and get my head round the flow of data. Then I will do a mock-up of the site, getting the functionality sorted. Finally, I will tweak it up with some fancy styles (where appropriate).

That's about it for now. I'm ready to go for it, and I'm fully prepared to tear my hair out doing it!
Take Care, Phil.