Website building.. low cost and easy

cirhossa1

Hi there, I am starting up as a sole trader. I need to build a website that will be full of info on my business and has contact details. It also needs to be showing up on searches from mobile phones.

I have bought my domain name, but am now finding that the site I bought it from is offering all of these offers which I'm not sure I need (I'm new and the jargon is confusing).

Is there a company that is low cost, searchable and will be easy for me to use?

Many thanks 😉

scaredofdebt

Your problem will be showing up in searches, especially if you have a lot of competitors, as they all want to be #1 on Google!

Your domain name can be an important factor for searches, so it is crucial that you get a domain that will be effective for you.

What offers is the site offering?

Generally you only need the domain and hosting, but depending on your level of expertise in building a website, you may want some kind of "website building" software.

If you want an ecommerce site, you may need a secure server, if your site is busy (thousands of visitors per day) you may want a dedicated server rather than a shared one etc.

fishybusiness

Is there a company that is low cost, searchable and will be easy for me to use?

Perhaps you need to break this down.

Low cost - do you mean yearly hosting, or design? Reading your brief, it looks as though you want an information website. Have a Google of Wordpress as it will do what you want fairly easily and cheaply.

Searchable - something you can do yourself when you have your sire set up. Google SEO, each of your pages needs a description and tags, a bit time consuming but doable yourself.

Easy to use - depends on your skills and ability to learn. If you can't do it have a look at People Per Hour, there are some able and low cost web designers around.

fishybusiness

I'd highly recommend you to go for a WordPress platform. It's cheap and simple. I personally used a pre-designed wordpress theme that was extremely flexible and mobile-friendly. Anyway,I wish you all the best on your new business!

Agree, my template cost circa £60 and is mobile friendly.

digitraveller

Another person recommending WordPress. You can purchase good quality themes, that are responsive designs so work beautifully on mobile devices of all types for less then £80. You can purchase hosting and a domain name for less than £100 a year. It'll depend on how much traffic you will have to your website. Obviously, you will need to learn how to buy a domain name, set up WordPress, and install the theme, but it isn't going to take you months to get into the basics. Obviously, if you don't have the time then they're plenty of designers out there - just make sure you ask to look at their portfolio, references and don't pay all your money up front.

graphicdesign1

Highly recommend Wordpress here. If you have a domain name and some hosting it is very easy to install.
You can then either use a free theme (these tend to be quite basic) or purchase a more advanced theme depending on what you want/need, the best place to buy themes is Themeforest and you can view samples of them all working before you go ahead.

If you need any help drop me a PM and I'll try and give you some help/ advice (free of charge)

All the best.

looknohands

I worked as a web designer a couple of years ago at an SEO agency, here's what was good practice back then. It may have changed now, I no longer work as a web designer and I wasn't an SEO expert so this is by no means expert or up to date advice.

Definitely use Wordpress, and utilize the SEO Plugin by Yoost, which is free, this will help a lot.

In your posts you should then have a Yoost section, allowing you to add keywords etc,
With keywords try to think locally is better, so something like 'Nottingham Accountant' is better than just 'Accountant' or 'UK Accountant'.

H1, H2, H3, with your keywords in these headings, any wordpress template will have these setup, so any title for a page will usually be an H1, use your keywords here, they are hierarchical, so highlight importance of titles, H3 would generally be a sub-heading in an article or something.

Image tags can include keywords, content age used to quite important as did an author link, so having a google profile used to be very helpful but might have been phased out now.

Having a well maintained blog used to be very good, you're always posting new content but obviously hard-work to maintain. We used to do a lot of accountants websites and we'd always create ton's of free advice blog posts, as people will often google search for "can i claim my lunch as an expense etc..", the newer the content the more google picked it up.

Keyword frequency in content, don't over-do it, maybe around 2% keyword density (cant recall exactly). Using Yoost plugin will help you with this, you'll also want to include keywords in page title (not the H1 but the literal page title).

If you want your site to be searchable on mobile make sure it's responsive, this should be within the wordpress theme. Google used to detect if sites were suitable for mobile, I'd imagine every WP theme is responsive these days.

Register your business address with google, then you'll come up on google maps and I believe this helps with searching, a lot of results these days are localised.

SEO isn't an exact science and it changes constantly. Hopefully the above helps you a little, definitely use Wordpress though, you should be able to set something up very cheap or get a local web designer to help you do this for a few hundred quid (unless you require e-commerce, expect to pay more)

LushesFaith

For my websites I bought my domain names and paid for hosting separately. It worked out cheaper for me. I bought a wordpress template for about £20-30 and it works fine.

I use Yoast SEO which is free. It's actually good at indicating how well your keyword choices are. It also does meta date so you can determine what summary shows in google searches for the whole website and each page etc.

rhysadams

Wordpress is brilliant, you can get a multisite website built for about £400 with a professional designer like https://designbygirls.co.uk or Nospario.

Most are SEO ready and gie you a guide on what you need to do to help you get to the tops of Google and Bing. Just be careful of these comapnies promising to get you to the top of google they use tricks to create backlinks that can be more halmful than good!

robbyfine

When I decided to build a website, I had trouble finding the right easy-to-use website builder with ready-made professional templates and high-quality free stock images. I was surfing the web and found this great article - http://www.webbuildersguide.com/paid-website-builders/ . I hope, you'll find it useful too!

deskhelp

Prefer dreamweaver or Wordpress for website development.