Creating a website 24 March at 8:18AM in Boost Your Income 18 replies 739 views

geek84

Good Morning

I want to create a website for my bookkeeping services.

I am thinking of using services like Go Daddy and Wix.

Which one would you suggest from the above, or would you suggest an alternative?

Thank You

LucyCan90

Can't help much as I have custom made PHP sites made for me as I work in a very competitive industry where SEO is critical. But from what I know, I would avoid Go Daddy for creating a website. Wix is very popular these days. Just make sure that Wix will allow you to create all the elements that you need your site to do (long term as well as short term). Hope that helps.

Browntoa

For a basic website look at WordPress

You can either buy a website address from them if you wish or buy it elsewhere and point it at your WordPress site ( extremely easy ) 

JosephWilliams

Completely agree with Browntoa about Wordpress. It is one of the best platform for site building out there. It outperforms Wix greatly.

CKhalvashi

Wordpress + TSOHost (for domain and hosting, around £25/year for most small businesses). There are a lot of tutorials on Youtube etc for how to actually build the website, and Wordpress platform itself is very customisable, to the extent that we've had several plugins developed for it over the years to fit our needs.

You're also not then limiting yourself to a certain company for either domains or hosting, making it possible to shop around come renewal time.

[Deleted User]

This depends on how comfortable you are doing a little bit of IT/web development, but if you're looking for a completely free option that still looks professional (this is a site about money saving after all) I used some open source software called Hugo to create my website. It's a static site generator which basically creates a very simple website for you using a set theme and you can then change all the text/images to suit.

It looks just as professional as what you get with Wordpress and other services, the downside is just that it's more complicated to do. Still, I'm far from an expert and I made my site in about an hour by following a YouTube guide. I then hosted it on a site called "render" which is free to use so I now have a professional looking website with free hosting and I didn't spend a penny.

coffeehound

Can anyone advise please, for a Wordpress site, is it possible to change the generic logo that appears in the browser tab?

CKhalvashi

coffeehound said:

Can anyone advise please, for a Wordpress site, is it possible to change the generic logo that appears in the browser tab?

Yes.

Appearance > Customise > Header Options > Site Identity.

coffeehound

Brill, thanks

scaredofdebt

As advised it's hard to rank well in the search engines due to the level of competition, but if you were wanting to concentrate on the local area then buying a domain like www.bookkeeperwigan.com would see you probably rank quite well for the term "bookkeeper wigan" in Google etc, other locations are available ;-)

This works better if your business is on Google maps and in the area you are targetting, you can add yourself for free - https://www.google.com/intl/en_gb/business

If you want to go for long tail keywords, then having sub-pages like "www.bookkeeperwigan.com/low-cost-bookkeeper" can also help you rank for those words.

Personally I'd avoid hyphens (in the main domain name) and .com domains are best but .co.uk are OK too.

Plenty of articles online about on-site SEO, have a read.

Google Adwords *might* work but the problem there is converting clicks into business.

Jenna_Appleseed

gordon_harris said:

This depends on how comfortable you are doing a little bit of IT/web development, but if you're looking for a completely free option that still looks professional (this is a site about money saving after all) I used some open source software called Hugo to create my website. It's a static site generator which basically creates a very simple website for you using a set theme and you can then change all the text/images to suit.

It looks just as professional as what you get with Wordpress and other services, the downside is just that it's more complicated to do. Still, I'm far from an expert and I made my site in about an hour by following a YouTube guide. I then hosted it on a site called "render" which is free to use so I now have a professional looking website with free hosting and I didn't spend a penny.

Looks like you need to understand web coding to be able to use hugo
 Their ebsite says "Hugo is for people that prefer writing in a text editor over a browser.

Hugo is for people who want to hand code their own website without worrying about setting up complicated runtimes, dependencies and databases."

Also from the support forum 
https://discourse.gohugo.io/c/support/34
"Some Knowledge Required

Dare we say that while Hugo is indeed pretty magical, it is not meant to be a “magic wand” to suddenly give you a published website a la Square Space or Wordpress. You are expected to already know how to assemble a static web page, for which you do need some basic knowledge of html, css, command line and text editors. Or how to prepare a space to host your website. The bottom line is, if you are unwilling to invest the time required to learn these things, then Hugo is not for you.

If you do put the time in, Hugo will help you rapidly merge your html templates, css, javascript, media, and even data, into a flexible working site. In addition, you get the added benefit of understanding how things fit together, which in turn makes understanding a variety of website builders and content management systems much easier. It is really a worthwhile investment to put the time in, to learn the basic building blocks well." 

Render - only free if your site/apps doesn't include anything that needs a database (like for a forum).
https://render.com/pricing