Website building - pls help!

Up_To_Scratch

Hey peeps!

I'm a self-employed sole trader in nails, beauty and holistic therapies, currently toying with the idea of - finally - setting myself up a website.

Anyhoo, just wanted your advice on the cheapest way of doing it, whilst still keeping a professional image.

Any advice greatly appreciated.

Many thanks!

G. x

WhiteLily_2

Hi

I am in same dilemma as you. I've just purchased Mr Site Takeaway Website from PC World for £24.99 (using their on line collect instore offer) and within one hour had my own domain name up and running. That's the easy bit - the next bit of being creative and getting to the top of search engines etc may need some help - but I still reckon it can be achieved relatively cheaply if you know a student or friend that is more familiar with web site design etc to guide you.

Good luck!

martindow

There are two sides to web site design. The first is the appearance and professional look of the site and the second is producing a site that is optimised to get listed well in search engines and these are not the same. There is no point in having a beautiful site that nobody ever finds.

There are various fairly basic things that need to be done for a site to get good listings in Google, etc - good titles and content with regular use of keywords, using h1 tags and having clean coding for example. Some template based web site systems make lovely looking sites but have bloated coding and give you no control over things that you would want to determine.

I would start from the optimisation side right at the beginning to decide the structure of your site and think about getting good SE listings for key words. This means that you will need to code html yourself or use a program like Dreamweaver which produces quite good code or Open Office which gives very clean code but where you do a bit more of the work.

You will find that you will want to constantly change and adjust the site so you really are best being totally in control of it.

save-a-lot

Hi

Try and get a free template from OSWD https://www.oswd.org - it stands for Open Source Web Design.

I picked these out as something suitable...

http://www.oswd.org/design/preview/id/2779

http://www.oswd.org/design/preview/id/3628

http://www.oswd.org/design/preview/id/3126

all of which need to be modified to suit your business. I can recomend using https://www.scriptlance.com to find a freelancer who would personalise a template, or create you one from scratch. At scriptlance you place a project and freelancers bid. When choosing a freelancer look at their feedback, use the PM board to ask questions of them etc and then choose someone with good feedback and a cheap price. The prices are very cheap as S/L is a Global site and you will get Global prices (so next to nothing to get work done)

HTH

save-a-lot

martindow wrote:

There are two sides to web site design. The first is the appearance and professional look of the site and the second is producing a site that is optimised to get listed well in search engines and these are not the same. There is no point in having a beautiful site that nobody ever finds

100% agree... the OSWD templates that I mentioned, all the templates are created using .css (cascading style sheets), basically this means that the pages are very "light", so behind the scenes there is no HTML, the pages are built by the style sheet and to look at the code behind the page there could only be maybe 100 lines. A HTML built page could be 400 lines plus to get the same effect. Anyway, having a site built using .css is a good start at having a well optimised website.

Astaroth

I have to say I am very much against this idea that websites for businesses should be done on a shoe string.

Do you buy your supplies from the poundshop as they are the cheapest place you can find something that is sold as nail polish (though if it had to under go a trades description test it may well fail) or do you buy a product of the quality that you want to be considered the quality of your company?

A website if nothing else is going to be a key piece of marketing material for you - if you want it to say you operate on a shoe string and are a budget operation then go with the cheapest you can find. As a business you can off sets its costs against your tax liability

save-a-lot

Have you actually had a look at the templates above?
(granted templates are not the best way forward in some circumstances, bespoke ones are a better way forward)
Have you ever used Scriptlance?
Do you know the quality that is available on a shoestring?
Do you know big players will use these cheaper freelancers

richt71

Astaroth wrote:

I have to say I am very much against this idea that websites for businesses should be done on a shoe string.

Do you buy your supplies from the poundshop as they are the cheapest place you can find something that is sold as nail polish (though if it had to under go a trades description test it may well fail) or do you buy a product of the quality that you want to be considered the quality of your company?

A website if nothing else is going to be a key piece of marketing material for you - if you want it to say you operate on a shoe string and are a budget operation then go with the cheapest you can find. As a business you can off sets its costs against your tax liability

I was gonna say the same thing. I have been marketing on the net for many years but just like most other things if you pay little then I'm afraid you'll not get much back. There's some great ways to get a good website and market it but the minimum it usually costs me is £600 per website. That's a one page website with basic marketing to get customers and payment intergration.
Keyword marketing is good (google adwords) but to get the best out of it you need at least £30 a day marketing budget for it although you get 1 months service before paying for it and you can track your success or otherwise on a daily basis.

save-a-lot

Well... use the World as the source of your designer and developer and pay the best prices Worldwide rather than prices that just happen to be the going rate in the UK. Before dismissing alternatives I urge you to try them. After all, a shoestring budget is megabucks for a developer in other parts of the World. Since the Internet is Global it is easy to source very good work cheaply. Fact: at least three of the popular cashback sites run using work done by freelancers abroad. Affiliatewindow used a freelancer from abroad for one of their tools.

There is alot of talent out there and it needs to be tapped into. For the record I have used this route and I have successful sites running and one in the wings. With regard to SEO, I develop with this in mind and will direct a freelancer to make the pages SE friendly, use mod_rewrite to give friendly URLs etc etc etc. If you know a bit yourself you can write this into a project.

Kilty_2

Not all UK designers/developers charge the earth for good quality work, why go abroad when you can find just as good on your doorstep and support the UK web design industry at the same time?

kimbatty

There are plenty of web designers out there working from home who would be able to give you a good looking and well optimised site for a good price. I started off my own business with a template which I purchased but I did have a really good go behind the scenes optimising tags and keywords so I got a really good ranking on the search engines.

I then decided to buy a proper shopping cart facility as I sell several 100 products and although it cost me nearly £300 it was the best money I ever spent. I can produce sites quickly and can also optimise them very easily as well.

You really do get what you pay for but if you're just looking for a general site not selling many products but just to give you a web presence, then contact some web designers and you'd probably be surprised at what they can put together for a minimal outlay. There are a couple of parenting websites I know which have several people on them who design great value websites