More and more people are shopping online. Searching for best prices has become easy with various online deal sites and forums. While it is very difficult to compete against already popular deal sites, you can still create some value  by postings deals in the niche markets. You can take the advantage of the fact that most of the online deal sites are very generic. They post deals on almost every category. If you are expert in some area, for example clothing,shoes,electronics  etc you can find bargains and post them on your niche shopping bargain site. While your visitors shop through your site, you earn commission on each purchase. Here is an example of a nice niche online deal site, TheBargainQueen. I am not affiliated to this site but I am listing it here to give you an idea.

In this article I am going to show you how easy it is to build a online deal site for a niche market. On this site I have built deals page for home networking stuff. Each deal posting  contains an image of the product, text description, rating and a buy button. A click on the image,text link or buy button takes visitor to the site where the product is offered at the lowest price. To see the live working deal site go to Deals on Powerline Ethernet.

There are various ways to build your bargain website. You can build the site using combination of HTML,CSS,Javascript and PHP. But that is too much to learn. The fastest and easiest route to get started with minimum amount of efforts, is to use free available Content Management System (CMS) software. I suggest we we sue Wordpress which is one of the best CMS systems out there. Importantly its fee and customization is easy.

Next issue is to pick up right theme. I like Arthemia theme. This site and thebargainqueen site are built using Arthemia.  Arthemia comes in two versions,Free and Premium. Everyone loves Free so lets use Arthemia Free edition and modify it to build great looking deal site.

Now lets get down to the task of creating our niche deals website. First Install Wordpress and Atrhemia theme in themes folder. Create your Arthemia website using the steps given in Wordpress Arthemia customization guide.

After you have created your Arthemia Website, Create a category called  “Deals on some junk”. Create several posts named “Junk1″,”Junk2″ with pictures in this category. Link each pictures to your affiliate website product page. For example when user clicks on the image on the post page he we be taken to the website like amazon.com product page from he can purchase the product and you get a commission.

List your category in the  category bar as shown in the customization tutorial . Click on the category link you will see that only the excerpt of all of your posts in the category page are listed. You will not see image or the buy button. By default Wordpress/Arthemia lists post on the category page as excerpt as shown below.

We want to make the above page look like this.

In order to show entire deal page for each page on the category page you need modify the way Wordpress list your pages in the category page. Arthemia does not have category.php or category-id.php template file in the theme. The category view is displayed by archives.php. We will do category view customization without tempering with the default Arthemia behavior. Copy archives.php to file name category.php. Save it in the theme directory. Open the newly category the php file and look for the following code snippet.

<div>
<?php    $values = get_post_custom_values(”Image”);
if (isset($values[0])) { ?>
<a href=”<?php the_permalink() ?>” rel=”bookmark” title=”Permanent Link to <?php the_title(); ?>”>
<img src=”<?php echo bloginfo(’template_url’); ?>/scripts/timthumb.php?src=/<?php
$values = get_post_custom_values(”Image”); echo $values[0]; ?>&w=150&h=150&zc=1&q=100″
alt=”<?php the_title(); ?>” width=”150px” height=”150px”  /></a>
<?php } ?>
<?php the_excerpt(); ?>
</div>

replace it with

<div>
<?php /* the_excerpt(); */ ?>
<?php the_content(); ?>
</div>

Save category.php file and test your category list page. You will notice that your entire posts are not listed on the category page. In case anything goes wrong , your reclaim the default behavior by deleting the newly created category.php file.

I had great fun creating a online deal site. I would be keen to know if you have been able create online deal site using this article. Feel free to ask questions, I enjoy fully supporting my articles. I know a lot of  hacks and trick up my sleeves, so ask questions.  Good Luck!!!