help please on web site bulding

mummyleads

hiya i am new to all this techie stuff

i am planning on setting up a bussness selling gift hampers and was wondering about setting up a web site my brother says there are free ones but dont really understand it all so was hoping you could help please i have limited funds avalable to set up the bussness so all help needed thanks

kwikbreaks

In general free hosting + home brewed website = few visitors and no sales.

With the proper skills you can save a lot of money but I'm guessing you don't have those skills so you'll need to pay someone who has otherwise you are just wasting your time.

PCease

Hi,

The free websites that allow you to list products are great but you may have to put up with adverts / pop-ups etc (possibly from competitors etc) which will make your site look unprofessional. Also, they are free and can pull the plug at any time.

I recommend registering a domain (such a .co.uk), get some hosting, and build your own website to your own spec using a dedicated shopping e-commerce engine.

There are loads of free and non-free commercial e-commerce engines you can use with most web hosting that are worth their salt!

The basics you need are:
Domain name (.co.uk £20 for 2 years max)
Hosting (roughly £80 per year depending for advanced features such as database, php etc)
Ecommerce Engine (free - £500 one off cost depending on the engine).
Cost to put a website together (£300-£1000 is normal).

I design and host websites and can do this for you - my rates are very competitive, post support etc. PM if you need more info and want to see some of my sites.

I own several dedicated servers I use for hosting client websites which are all UK based and offers unlimited traffic because it has its own dedicated fibre optic link and its own data center that is not shared with other hosting companies.

Cheap (or free) hosting is normally US based (or European) which means you may lose a lot of UK based traffic in the search engines).

Kind regards

Paul

gwyne

You probably want to find a professional to work on your site if it is going to be e-commerce (selling things). You'll have more choice to make it look good and make sure people want to buy. Off the shelf / free designs tend to look a bit dodgy and not sure I would trust that kind of site to buy things from. Also a professional would be able to advise on really important aspect of e-commerce like SSL (to make your site secure for buying), payment methods (integrating Paypal), probably even install Google Analytics for you to monitor traffic and visitor sources. Oh and don't forget marketing too Good Luck

nickmatthews

Mummyleads,

Agree with all above, I also build websites in my spare time for friends & family.

I could possibly help build you a site & get it hosted at a highly competitive price. I ain't a pro web builder but am happy to discuss & show you sites I have built.

If you are interested PM me.

There's a few sales pitches going on here!!!

savemoney

PCease you need to remove your signature as you are asking people to check your profile and it comes across as a advert

somebody10

It is easy enough to create a professional looking website using the many free templates available all over the net for nearly any kind of site, selling almost anything. You can get a free copy of Dreamweaver off the Adobe website for 30 days and use that to create it then sign upto a free hosting company such as Webhost 000 that are based in America but are quite good I find for free of course.

You will as mentioned need to buy a domain name to point to the website which won't cost much and add meta tags to the head section of each page making the description and key words relevant to the page content as well as the title - this has to also be relevant to the content.

Once you have got you're site up and running you can submit it to search engines after you have checked how well optimised the meta tags are using tools on the SEO website such as meta tag analyizer, if you get very good or excellent then its all good. For no cost you can google Add me to submit to all major search engines.

For an online shop I would suggest using OS Commerse which just requires a SQL database and PHP enabled web server which supports SSL encryption. You can get it for free other than the SSL encryption side of it which of course, is very important and needs to be implimented and web hosts that have SSL enabled web servers will charge, I have yet to find a free one, but if anyone knows of any please let me know, either on here or PM, thanks.

kwikbreaks

It seems you failed to read the initial post...

mummyleads wrote: »

hiya i am new to all this techie stuff

Mudd14

PCease wrote: »

The basics you need are:
Domain name (.co.uk £20 for 2 years max)
Hosting (roughly £80 per year depending for advanced features such as database, php etc)
Ecommerce Engine (free - £500 one off cost depending on the engine).
Cost to put a website together (£300-£1000 is normal).

I design and host websites and can do this for you - my rates are very competitive, post support etc. PM if you need more info and want to see some of my sites.

I personally feel this is expensive for domain and hosting, you could get domain names for £6.00 for two years and hosting for a year at £10.00! I could sort out unlimited webspace and bandwidth for £40.00 per annum.

This isnt a sales pitch just a realistic price comparison.

PCease

The values I quoted are "max" costs that I normally charge (which are still very reasonable).

At the end of the day you get what you pay for.. cheap hosting you normally get poor European/USA based servers that are over subscribed packing in 1000's of websites onto a single server..

It only takes a couple of websites to do something more than displaying html such as a busy download page or badly coded custom php script that will take up all the resources then your website (and everyone else on this server) will suffer from slow page loads, may not even load and you suffer downtime and loss of sales!

Kurtis_Blue

I use http://www.actinic.co.uk/ecommerce-software-for-businesses/products/actinic-catalog.html

Highly recommend for the non techy, and very good for inbuilt seo, google base feeds, checkout integration etc.