Like, how do I (re)design my pages? She threw this at me after the site design was done, pages were up and paid for.
My thought is to just make a "purchase" page with what's for sale on it and add a nav button to link it. I just don't know how to incorporate the checkout stuff.
So you had a site built that was some sort of gallery/advertising, and at the last second your client wants to sell stuff? That is, unfortunately, a major repurposing of the site. If she's an artist, I would guess that these are one-of-a-kind items (inventory level always "1", no backorder, when it's gone it's gone, etc.). Customers would likely buy one thing at a time (no shopping cart really needed)? You may be able to get away with a PayPal "Buy Now" (or whatever it's called) button, which is just some HTML dropped into each item's page. When it's sold and shipped, you remove the button and can continue to show the object d'art as a gallery sample. Maybe that would work.
she doesn't want to spend any more money (on security certificates, among other things)
If her site is going to pass off the actual handling of credit card numbers to a third party payment system (PayPal, Google, etc.), rather than a payment gateway/merchant account (where her site actually collects the CC number), SSL is not absolutely necessary for her site. The third party system handles it all under SSL. Customers may be more willing to buy, and hand over shipping information (name, address, phone, email), on an SSL-protected page, but that's up to her. Remember that SSL only protects information in-transit between the browser and server; other security measures and policies are needed to protect customer data on the server, and you really can't do much to protect information on the browser end (cache, etc.).
