Website building - pls help!

richt71

I use elance to place my website design projects. I don't mind where people come from TBH just as long as they are rated well and can show examples of previous work! Think I paid £180 last time for a one page, intergrated paypal with thank you page website.

ddavis

kimbatty wrote:

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 agree. I happen to know one very well...

Up_To_Scratch

Hi everyone! & thanks so much for all your input - plenty there to keep me busy! Although I was disappointed with the following post:

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 am currently working part time, seeing very few clients per week (I am now a single mother) and looking to gradually increase my workload; as a result, I do not have the resources available to me to do this website any other way than on a restricted budget. I think it is important sometimes to remember that every person's circumstances are different and not to scorn those who perhaps need to observe pretty stiff financial restrictions due to no fault of their own. Just my humble opinion though.

As I said, very much appreciate everybody's input - many thanks! )

Namaste

G. x

Up_To_Scratch

Also worth mentioning, I am absolutely not a "budget operation" and use - in my opinion - the highest quality products available - sometimes sourcing nail technologies from the US, for quality reasons - and am constantly studying/training in new therapies & to the highest level (yes, at a cost) which is precisely why I need to be careful not to overspend in other areas of my business.

Many thanks, once again, to you all. x

richt71

Up_To_Scratch wrote:

Hi everyone! & thanks so much for all your input - plenty there to keep me busy! Although I was disappointed with the following post:



I am currently working part time, seeing very few clients per week (I am now a single mother) and looking to gradually increase my workload; as a result, I do not have the resources available to me to do this website any other way than on a restricted budget. I think it is important sometimes to remember that every person's circumstances are different and not to scorn those who perhaps need to observe pretty stiff financial restrictions due to no fault of their own. Just my humble opinion though.

As I said, very much appreciate everybody's input - many thanks! )

Namaste

G. x

I understand your reply but the reply was honest. Unfortunately there's few shortcuts to a successful website with little costs. Sorry!

save-a-lot

richt71 wrote:

I understand your reply but the reply was honest. Unfortunately there's few shortcuts to a successful website with little costs. Sorry!

You can produce a good quality site, built with SEO in mind for not too much money and also build natural traffic to it over a few months. It is a matter of knowing where to source the work. I have paid $350 for design and top notch bespoke scripting, including CMS, member management, payment management, newsletter etc etc - all fresh coded, with no off the shelf scripts. So it can be done.

rare_stuff

Something not mentioned here, well at least not on this thread, is joining affiliate schemes to help your website pay for itself.

Commission Junction is a great place to start to find advertisers in a complementary field to your business.

The other I would recommend is amazon affiliates where you can place links to specific products on amazon or allow amazon to create self-optimisoiing links based on your website content.

richt71

rare_stuff wrote:

Something not mentioned here, well at least not on this thread, is joining affiliate schemes to help your website pay for itself.

Commission Junction is a great place to start to find advertisers in a complementary field to your business.

The other I would recommend is amazon affiliates where you can place links to specific products on amazon or allow amazon to create self-optimisoiing links based on your website content.

I'm sorry I don't agree with that. Affliate sites are great but if you put links on a website with your products customers leave your website. One or the other for me. Also I'd have an opt-in box for customers to leave their name and email address. Maybe offer an incentive to do so.

saraharrow

Hi,

Please PM / Email me, and I will tell you what we use and what it costs etc, I havent wrote it here because I dont wont to get into trouble for 'advertising', I am a total novice at website building and I have done this one for my partners business https://www.arrowlighthaulage.co.uk

Its not perfect, but I can do it easily in my spare time and we are getting around 50 hits a day by promoting through leaflet drops. When we were using google ad words we found that we found on average 100 hits per month. Friends of ours swear by using the enhanced listing feature in yell.com but we havent tried it yet.

Good luck

Sarah

Astaroth

richt71 wrote:

I'm sorry I don't agree with that. Affliate sites are great but if you put links on a website with your products customers leave your website.

Totally agree.... affiliates and advertising in general is only for sites that are "information only" (like this site) and are not trying to sell you anything directly.

If you are selling a product or service you really shouldnt be looking at links that take you away from your site. Affiliate schemes are bad enough but the number of people running Google Adsense where they are advertising their competitors sites in the most prominent parts of their own site for a massive 5p per click is sheer madness.

The one possible exception to this if you do a link exchange with other businesses which have complimentary services (and ideally with sites with a high page rank). So if you are selling hair products then you could link with hair dressers that dont sell hair products... they promote your products, you promote their services.