SSL Certificates

My dad wanted me to try and rewrite this site of his (it just costs a lot for his company to change text and stuff, thought he would pay me instead. He also thought the layout was not very clean and some links are broken):
http://www.wcwrestlingusa.com/

Well, I am hosted by Dreamhost and am using RW to make the new site here (it is not live and no customers go there yet):
http://www.wcwusa.com

Dreamhost has a one click install of zen cart and I am pretty comfortable with it in some of the test installs that I have done. Right now the shopping cart is not installed, though. I was wondering if when I secure the site, do I secure the entire domain (http://www.wcwusa.com), or do I secure only the sub domain that the cart resides in (ie. hxxp://www.wcwusa.com/myshoppingcart)?

I have been through all of the Dreamhost procedures many times, but was confused on this point. Any advice or direction would be greatly appreciated. Thanks.

By the way, the plan is to move his domain from his old host to my server and then post a redirect page to the new domain name along with mass emails to customers.

You'll want to purchase a SSL cert for the domain name that the store will be hosted on. So if the store is going to be http://www.wcwusa.com/store then you would register http://www.wcwusa.com. Now do know that there is a difference between www.wcwusa.com and wcwusa.com and subdomain.wcwusa.com so you'll need to pick wisely, unless you buy a wildcard certificate then you can use any subdomain that you would like, but it's also quite a bit more expensive.

thanks for the reply. So, if I understand right, I get the whole site protected and choose a specific and formal address - ie. www.wcwusa.com - to have protected with the certificate. People with type that address in and then the certificate will change the address automatically to the "https://"

Is that right?

Thanks for you help, I really appreciate it!

No, on your site you'll need to link to https://www.wcwusa.com the SSL cert does not know when you want to switch to SSL and when you want to be on an unsecure port. So you need to determine on your links when it switches.

Murlyn, thanks for your patience.

Would it be best if I mapped a subdirectory called something like "store", then installed zen cart in that directory, then secured http://store.wcwusa.com?

As long as that is the only thing that you would want to use the SSL cert for, then yeah that is fine. Otherwise you'll probably want to keep it to www.wcwusa.com so that you can secure these:

http://www.wcwusa.com/store
and
http://www.wcwusa.com/client_login
and
http://www.wcwusa.com/test.com/
etc
etc
etc

So you might want to figure out your long term plan before deciding on which domain to secure.. or like I said go with the wildcard SSL cert and do not worry about it, do all the subdomains your heart desires

thanks for your help, that makes a more sense now. I've got some more thinking to do now! haha