Setting up a website for business

steve1980

JuniorDesigner wrote: »

Let us know how you've got on OP. Would be interesting to know which way you've gone with this!

It would be interesting to know if someone from the MSE world got the work by PMing the OP.

oldoakey

steve1980 wrote: »

Bargain of the century.....NOT!

What a rip off. £304.88 year one then £239.88 after that just for hosting. :eek:

Some people have more money than sense.

And your advice is to tell them to get a website specially built for them. I wonder how much that would cost.

The reason I recommend EKM is because of the backup and functionality are superb. And at £19.99 per month with no contract (+£65 sign up fee) what better way to start a budding business. Which at this moment probably does not know if the website is going to be a success or not, after all that is what this is about making money being profitable.

Remember people cheapest is very often not the best option.

SaverKate_2

The total creation one posted earlier looks a good price for quite a lot? (sorry not allowed to post links) Does anyone have any experience of them/know if their work is any good? I'm not really sure what to look for in the sites.

texranger

SaverKate wrote: »

The total creation one posted earlier looks a good price for quite a lot? (sorry not allowed to post links) Does anyone have any experience of them/know if their work is any good? I'm not really sure what to look for in the sites.

they did a site for me a few years ago for a community group i was involved with. when i was unable to commit to the group due to work commitments i handed the site and the hosting it was on over to another member of the group and forgot to take a copy of the site. the last i heard the group failed to pay their hosting fees so their site was terminated and they too never took backups.

SaverKate_2

Is that something you should do then, take a back up of a site? Sorry if this is a stupid question, but how do you do that?
It is a bit worrying that the web company don't have a back up, or is that not the norm?

When I was having a look on their portfolio I noticed one of their client websites said it had been hacked! Again, I have no idea if that sort of thing is done frequently or not, but on the website seemingly the hacker posted a message saying the website had no security. Again, not a clue if that is just bad luck or if there is a problem with security (I wouldn't even know what website security consisted of!).

ILoveChocolate

My hubby has used people per hr for logo design and was very happy with them, goodluck with the business:)

texranger

SaverKate wrote: »

Is that something you should do then, take a back up of a site? Sorry if this is a stupid question, but how do you do that?
It is a bit worrying that the web company don't have a back up, or is that not the norm?

When I was having a look on their portfolio I noticed one of their client websites said it had been hacked! Again, I have no idea if that sort of thing is done frequently or not, but on the website seemingly the hacker posted a message saying the website had no security. Again, not a clue if that is just bad luck or if there is a problem with security (I wouldn't even know what website security consisted of!).

most good hosts will do a server backup ( backup of all sites on server) either daily or weekly, but if anything goes wrong they may charge you to get your recent backup off them, but if the host does a runner then you wont get your backup.
Most hosts will have in their TOS that it is the responsibility of the site owners to make regular backups.

if you use cpanel you can backup through cpanel, but then you need to make sure the backup gors to your own local computer or to a third party backup services (their are a few good ones) that will charge approx. £2 a month to take backups of your cpanel accounts.

I myself backup my servers to a specific server that is used just for backups and i backup daily, but when a client signs up for hosting their have the oprion of paying an extra £2 a month which will allow them to request the backups at anytime if they need them. if they dont take this option then they either have to rely on backups they make themselves or ask me for the backups and i then will charge them £15

terra_ferma

I agree with people who say EKM is a rip off, the hype is good, but when you look into it their service offers very poor value for money compared to other shopping carts.

Create.net is highly recommended, you can set up a free trial for 30 days. The £9.99 package is excellent value for money, compares well with EKM.

I would recommended testing a few and deciding the one that suits you. If you have a lot of products to sell Create.net is probably the cheapest, if you don't, you have more choice.
Freewebstore doesn't look bad either.
Mr site doesn't have great reviews so I didn't bother trying it.

The best source of information on hosted carts for me was the crafts forum, simply because you can actually look at the poster's website and look at what they have been able to achieve with the cart they have been using (pretty unique feature as normally people are not allowed to, or choose not to, post links on forums).

There is also a fairly new option, Magento Go, hosted version of Magento. If you are a newbie I'd stay away from it, it's very complicated to set up.

If you are a bit more adventurous you could go for an open source cart and either adapt an existing template, or hire a proper designer if you can afford it (I have been quoted £250 to £1200, so it depends of what you want really).

You don't need to spend a lot of money to have a decent website, you can do a lot yourself. It can be time consuming, and if you don't enjoy the technical side probably a bit tedious, but it can also be great fun.

HTH

PS whatever you do make sure you OWN YOUR DOMAIN, as the all-in-one solutions can be risky, I've heard of companies making it difficult for you to take your domain with you if it's not registered in your name. Easy to do, simply buy a domain separately and point it to the hosted site.

terra_ferma

texranger wrote: »

NO self advertising allowed on these forums

I assume there was a spam post after mine that was deleted...?

Savvy_Sue

tex and terra, if you want to delete your own posts, you can. When you have, I'll delete this one, to keep us looking tidy. Or I can report us all and get The Team to do it!