Website advice

treecol

Don't know if this is the right place on the forum for this. But does anyone know the best way to get a website for a new business? I've seen adverts for companies like GoDaddy etc, but would we be better using a local web builder, or are companies like the one above a good idea -bearing in mind I'm computer illiterate!
How much shouls I expect a website to cost? It's not going to be very complicated, perhaps one main page & perhaps up to three simpler aditional pags, all with some pictures & a page for client testamonials. Many thanks if you can advise.

Browntoa

godaddy etc ok for what you are describing , no shop facilty and only basic pages


web designer will charge loads ....use templates on godaddy

macca1974

no experience of go daddy, but I looked at doing a simple website at the start of the year. Once you've sorted your hosting, have a look at wordpress (its a free program / blog thing which you can build all your content onto) which I found let you build sites really easily (and had a number of free templates and loads of paid for ones). I spoke to a few website designers as well and the costs quoted by them started at around £400 and went as high as £2K for something fairly simple. If its something easy and you've got a bit of time, it doesn't take that long to put something half decent up.

cono1717

To tag onto the wordpress post if you want to add a shop onto it use a plugin called WooCommerce

chunter

Yip go with someone local who has a portfolio of stuff that you like.
Simple websites like that will only cost a couple of hundred quid to set up. And 30-40 quid a year to maintain.

You could hack around with wordpress, but the chances are it'll not be optimised properly for google and it'll look like a wordpress website.

Images are really important, so don't mess around with some silly camera phone. spend a few extra quid on getting proper photos that fit what you're selling. Those first few seconds are crucial.

If you haven't compiled printed advertising speel before, it's worth taking a few days to write down what it is the company does and how to best to say what your services / products are. This has to be merged with what phrases / words that perspective clients may type into google to find your stuff. Stay away from the generic 'best product on the market' stuff, google treats that stuff like the word 'the'.

You're coming late to the party, so if it's a popular product / service, you're going to have problems getting on that first page. So be patient. Also, Google sometimes lets new websites shoot up onto the front page, but then after a few weeks it falls away because google realises the content is static.

Make sure the website works well on mobile devices and big tv screens. That if you click on your phone number, it will ring that number.

Oh, and if you are hoping people will print off website pages, make sure they look ok when they're printed. So for a start, white background only. An option for complicated pages is a print-as-pdf button, which works reasonably well.

Locality is important too, so sign up for all the google bits, including maps.

As you can see, your web man will give you a whole lot more options and ideas, rather than an amateurish wordpress hack.

deskhelp

For ecommerce you can even take a look at magento ,shopify got hosted Ecommerce store ready for you.

treecol

Thank you so much for your advice. It's for a dog walking/boarding service. Really busy so far with no advrtising so far - all word of mouth. I need to make sure when someone does a google search, my page comes up - I offer some very specialist services no one else does - is there any way I can protect those services, making them unique to me, or just rely on the fact it's aspects of the industry that no one else wants to supply?