Website and Hosting

wellyftw

Terrysdelight said:

wellyftw said:

Terrysdelight said:

Neil_Jones said:

I think something like Wordpress (which as I say you may already be able to add from a control panel in your hosting settings) may do what you want.  Then you can update it yourself.  Okay you'd have to learn how to use it properly but once you do, it takes care of itself.  The latest versions of Wordpress do all of that and you can have as many pages as you want.

The "full colour website" thing sounds like it's on loan from the 1990s and the days before graphics on web pages was a thing, in all honesty.  Doesn't take any more effort to do it in colour than it would have done in black and white...

I guess the £125 really covers some of the website design costs.  Other businesses would probably charge for design and hosting separately. Would building my own using wordpress still let me register with google, bing etc, also ssl (for security) ?

Yes it would. You can have Wordpress host your site at wordpress.com and you get SSL automatically when you host with them. And yes, it'll let you register with google, bing and so on.

The lady said I would need a facebook page so I could link to the website, I didn't particularly want to do this but I guess this would be to help promote the website.

Probably wise. It's an addition link to your which assists with SEO. Alas people expect a bit of interaction via facebook and so it could be a bit of an on going thing. Ie. you'd need to keep an eye on people making posts to your facebook page. It probably is worth the effort of keeping a facebook page for your business maintained a for perhaps few hours a week. Shows you're still in business if nothing else.

What about email addresses - how do I ensure I have enough email addresses?

How many do you need? You can usually have as many email aliases as you need but not sure why you'd need more than a "sales@mydomain" or similar.

Thanks, a really helpful post.
I think I would want 4, maybe 5 email addresses.  I do intend for the business to grow and there will be me and two p/timers to start with.  Then obviously I would want and enquiry@my domain etc.

Ah, fair enough re: the email addresses. That shouldn't be a problem, most hosting packages will come with X individual email accounts or X email aliases where sales/enquiries/hello@mydomain all go to the same inbox.

forgotmyname

£125+vat?    I pay less than £60 for unlimited traffic and upto 10 unique domains. 200 email addresses per domain.

Start by making your own site until you know that a better one will actually bring in more business.

a

I used hostinger when they had a free offering, just to test pages out and supply a link to clients for testing. They now charge $0.99 per month and include weekly backups. If you have static pages, no payment processing, most isp can give a fixed IP, or use ddns, and you could even run your own web server from a 
https://www.tomshardware.com/news/raspberry-pi-web-server,40174.html
or build your own wordpress server https://roboticadiy.com/raspberry-pi-4-lamp-web-server-with-wordpress/
Personally would pay the $12 a year or or the $2.98 p/m for the unlimited email accounts plan.  There very well could even be cheaper, as many are now just using facebook and do not even have a site.

pramsay13

I would say forget about a website until you have tried and tested the business.
Great a free Gmail account and free pages on Facebook, yell.com, google my business etc.
If it works then you can worry about a website.