Question about ecommerce development

Hi I am going to be developing a new site where I am selling children's furniture and home products. I have read all the reviews here about certain shopping cart systems and what you recommend. However, I want my site - at least my home page to look very attractive as well as search engine friendly to my customers. I looked at zencart and x cart templates and they just don't have the look I'm after. I cannot afford to have someone design my site for me at this time. So here are the choices of shopping cart systems and what I found out about them:

Yahoo store - good system and generates pages in .html format. However, still has a basic look of a "store" and the navigation bar is in image links instead of text? Is this something that should make me steer away from this website developer?

Zen Cart and X-cart - I cannot seem to find any demo sites to look at that use them. As I said before, I do not like the templates I've seen for them. I want something more soft and feminine looking.

Aspdotnetstorefront - I couldn't find anything on their site or even any template designs.

Does anyone know of recommendations I could do to make my site look pretty and professional with using any of these shopping cart systems? Or am I going to have to use some sort of a Dreamweaver or Front Page extention with it? I really do not know how to use either one of those systems. Tried, but couldn't figure it out. Thanks in advance.

Keep in mind that any solution you don't write yourself or pay someone to write for you will have some quirks. Any type of CMS or ecommerce package will do that. I write my own here and haven't regretted it since we have some pretty crazy needs that required some custom coding.

I do like Zen Cart of the pre-fab options just because it's a bit easier to setup than most packages out there. The templates can be lacking but, if I were you, I'd pay for one of the more professional ones.

I have a Yahoo store and have been very pleased with their service and ease of use. I designed the site myself using the Version 3 of the Store Editor, and haven't had any problems optimizing the site. You might want to check them out.

Faith

Thanks Faith! I had pretty much decided to go with Yahoo since it's familiar to me and I've heard it has good platform and code. Plus it is fairly easy to use. I didn't know they had different versions though. Is Version 3 the best one? I definitely want to be able to put quite a bit of text on home page plus be able to have a text link navigation bar rather than an image link one (if that makes sense).

As far as I know the version 3 is the most updated version. There's a lot you can do on your own, and they also have a forum that has web designers, coders, and most importantly, other Yahoo store owners who share their knowledge and advice.

Faith

Faith I have a question. When looking under your source code I see you have a meta description tag in your meta tags. My yahoo store doesn't allow a meta description tag on my index page. How did you get one? Did you put it in html code somewhere in the site builder? If so, where was it put so I can put one in mine?

And if you had someone do it for you, can you recommend them or someone else who could optimize my meta tags? Sorry about so many questions.