I am about to build a website for my business and I have seen places such as go daddy who have very inexpensive fees for hosting and site building but I want it to look professional. So, the question is whether or not it is better to hire someone to do it and manage it or to build your own.

For those who have built there own how easy it to do just a basic less than 10 page website?

Posted By Davis Linder on 22 Apr 2010 04:29 PM
I am about to build a website for my business and I have seen places such as go daddy who have very inexpensive fees for hosting and site building but I want it to look professional. So, the question is whether or not it is better to hire someone to do it and manage it or to build your own.

For those who have built there own how easy it to do just a basic less than 10 page website?

Davis:

The only thing worse than a business with no website is a business with a website that looks like a do-it-yourself job. You know, the one's with the "this section under construction" section.

If you can't build it right and have it look professional, don't build anything at all.


Joe

Davis,

You seem like a smart guy. Go Daddy is great! They hosted a webite of mine once.They were very affordable! I cancelled my website. Im notorious and everyone knows me. I didnt need it for biz, as amazing as that sounds now a days. Im an old guy and prefer fax, phone, email.

Please disregard the previous post. If that guy had a company website he would scream it from the rooftops.  If he does have one Im sure he willl post and tell us all about it. Look at others websites (Tom and Andy have good ones) and do yours the same. Let your relatives  and employees log in and critique it. Then make changes.
 
Hope this helps.

Davis, I built my website using Yahoo Sitebuilder. According to Andy and Val it sucks, but I am not trying to attract business with it, my company is small enough that referals keep me busy. I don't have the time to chase leads that go nowhere.
 My site is informational for customers to view my work and make cabinet selections, that's it.

HI, Davis. I hope you are are well.
There is good advice here, but you need to first determine what you want your website to do, say, or communicate.

I have quite a few pages, but all of them are very simple in their layout. There are no videos, it is very light on images, not a lot of rollover hyperlinks and no flash stuff (stuff that changes images or sounds automatically). The reason is my customer base is mostly my age or older and I need to cater towards the simple and fast loading.

Another convention I avoid is in the "keep it short" category. I have a very informational heavy website. I try to encapsulate the over all in the first two paragraphs, but I go well beyond that for most pages. If the consumer wants to skim and move on, they have the gist, but they can get a real education if they stay and read. I have gotten tremendous feedback from customers and almost all of it is very positive.

Last, I don't have a blog or any twitter/facebook/etc. linking on my site. One, I don't trust a lot of the social networking stuff, yet. Two, if you are going to have a blog, you'd better be prepared to update that every day or two, or you will be worse for having it.

As a contrast, look at Sterling Surfaces site. Masterpiece of modernity. Flash, bells, whistles, etc. Truly state of the art. Olive Mills site as well. They do so much more than mine, but we expect different things out of our sites.

Good luck.

I'll chime in here. Norm is still mad cause I told him to fix his website. Norm's site is a perfect example of how difficult it can be to use the template system to develop a website. Norm didn't try to make thing misaligned, the template just made it that way.

You will achieve excellent results if you use a template and keep it simple, almost stupid simple.

If you want it to look like a professional designed it, you will have to either teach yourself or hire someone. I have spent hours just trying to do one thing on my website where it would have taken a professional less than a minute.

All is great until something goes wrong and then trying to fix it is almost impossible without assistance.

Wordpress, Joombla are both really great platforms. DotNetNuke is another good one, but may get a little complicated. FabNet and OliveMill.com are both built on DNN.

I built this website in about a week www.CountertopReview.com BUT, I already had all the content. CTReview was built on Wordpress platform so you can see the posibilities.

Content is king when it comes to websites and getting a good rank from Google. You will probably spend hours, days and weeks trying to figure it all out. This is where a pro can really help.

Remember, you need content and good content. This includes text and images along with logos, icons and links. For example you will need all the manufacturer logos that you sell. All images will have to be optimized to 72dpi and formatted correctly before upload. All images should have supporting ALT text and descriptions.

Blogs are great if you keep them up to date. They seem out of date real quick if you are not prepared to write relevant articles and upload at least once a month. This can be very time consuming.

Hope this helps,

Andy

Funny that this thread popped up when it did....

I am rolling out a new service that will be B2B - Website Design/Start Up/Hosting.

I will be rolling this out at Coverings next week - It's 12:31AM on Sunday morning...
I have been up since 4:00AM Saturday morning, and I don't expect to get any sleep
until I am somewhere over New Mexico - in about 6 hours from now...

I grown tired of telling people how easy it is to do your own website, so instead of continually running my head into a brick wall - I decided to change the wall...

Here's what I am doing in a nut shell - It's called Natural Stone 101 Network - and one of the aspects of our service to fellow contractors will be to offer a complete package for the guy that does not have the time and/or the know how to do his own website, and he does not want to pay thousands of dollars to a web company that doesnt know anything about the countertop business.

For a set up fee of under $100 dollars, our customers will get their domain name, get to choose from 5 different styles of web page templates, and go live on the internet. They'll pay a monthly hosting fee tha covers changes to their website (adds, deletions, etc.) IF they want to have their own e-mail accounts tied in to their website - we can do that too. It will all be priced on how much you want to do.... and it will be reasonable / incredibly difficult to NOT buy a plan if you don't have a website, but want one.

I will be rolling Natural Stone 101 Network out on Tuesday April 27th at Coverings - so as not to hi-jack this thread - check out out live broadcasts that will be carried right here on Fabricator Network.

as far as the OP goes - I am all for doing stuff myself - GoDaddy is the bomb!!! I like using iWeb WAAAAAAAY more than a PC based program....

my .02cents worth

kevin

Hey guys thanks for the help.

Andy, all that info just kind of blew my mind. By the way this website is amazing as well as the Olive Mill site.

Jon, a blog. Man I barely know what a blog is much less keeping up with it. But, since you are a doctor I will seriously look into that.

Tom, thanks for the time as well. I agree the first thing is to decide the direction.

Basically, to start what I want to do is just get a web presence. More of a informational site to refer people to and then down the road more for advertising online. So, I will venture out down the road of doing it myself and see what happens.

Appreciate it.

Davis,
I was just complimented by an architect who stumbled on my site looking for some info. It really isn't much, but take a look. It is simple, simple, informative and simple.
www.mathertops.com

If you don't consider yourself computer savy I wouldn't attempt it. I consider myself pretty good with technology but the last site I created took me days to finish and I still wasn't completely satisfied with the results.

For the site we have now we had a web developer make the site in exchange for some tops. We still need to get the page info updated a little better for search engine optimization but it looks nice when people find it. He also hosts the site on his server but if you have a business server for your local computer network it's not too difficult to host yourself once the site is made.


http://www.mwtops.com/

I would suggest the company that designs your site, NOT host it.  If they decide to get lazy it is easier to control your own site, cut off the old guy and hire a new guy.

Have it hosted at a company like GoDaddy or something. You can always give the designer permission to access the account to make changes.

If there is ever a problem, just change their password.

And always, always have them send you a copy of the site and a backup.  That way if the guy falls off the earth you still have a website that you can have someone host for you.

Norm wrote:

"I built my website using Yahoo Sitebuilder. According to Andy and Val it sucks, but I am not trying to attract business with it, my company is small enough that referals keep me busy. I don't have the time to chase leads that go nowhere.
My site is informational for customers to view my work and make cabinet selections, that's it."

Norm,

The purpose of a good website isn't to produce "leads that go nowhere." A good website will pre-sell and pre-qualify so that the leads that are produced are quality leads. A lead who surfs a good website will develop confidence in a company before ever contacting them, and will require far less selling once the initial contact is made. A good customer contact form will ask all the right questions, and help you weed out the unpromising leads with minimum effort. I consider a large percentage of the customers who contact me through Google AdWords or other online paths to be "pre-sold" and ready to schedule a job as soon as they first get in touch with us. Often, we never have a phone conversation or speak directly to the customer until we knock on their door to start work. All the advance communication is handled online. I even have an online appointment calendar so customers can pick dates at their own convenience.

A customer who thinks your website sucks may well fear that other aspects of your busines suck as well, and take their business elsewhere. Some customers won't care, but the younger affluent educated customers certainly will care.

I'm not belittling the importance of referrals - we get lots of business that way too. But you should ask those who refer business to your company to send potential customers to your website instead of calling you right when you are busy with something else.

GoDaddy hosts my site, and they are cheap and reliable. I use a good independent web designer who knows me well but Jon is right. The designer will handle the technical end. You've got to provide a broad array of content specific to your business. If you can't write convingly about your own business, then hire a freelance writer who knows your industry. Perhaps someone like . . . me.

Hi Jim, gee I felt genuine concern right up to the end of the post, lol. Seriously though I may contact you in the future, right now my belt is so tight I can't breathe.

Norm,

I think you have quality information on your site, but it just needs to be organized better. We are friends so I used the word SUCKS. I can sugarcoat it for you and say it needs a bit of "Refreshing".

I'll even help you out with it.

Norm,

I just looked at your website and I agree with Andy. It is not a terrible website, but it is a bit behind the times. It's a lot like my first website from 11 years ago. Mine is also behind the times, but maybe two or three years behind. If you are interested, I would be happy to write a more detailed review. But if you have absolutely no wish to change it, then so be it.

Jim, I built the site without a template, I should have used it and still may, that way everything will line up consistently from page to page. I also plan on adding a FAQ page or two, I have alot of information I could put there. Any suggestions would be appreciated.

Brian,
Nice website. Very clean, and it looks like you project the kind of public face a retailer would like in a wholesaler.
Question, Are the pics on the home page yours or press photos from the manufacturers?

Posted By Norm Walters on 20 May 2010 05:57 AM
Hi Jim, gee I felt genuine concern right up to the end of the post, lol. Seriously though I may contact you in the future, right now my belt is so tight I can't breathe.

Norm:

When you've finished paying Jim for writing, you'll need me to proofread:

"If you can't write convingly about your own business, then hire a freelance writer who knows your industry. Perhaps someone like . . . me."



I found this on a Corian distributor's website:

"This project-based, hands-on Fabrication and Installation Training Course for DuPont™ Corian® is led a DuPont Certified Instructor, and is a prerequisite for a company to become a DuPont Certified Fabricator/Installer for Corian®. It is designed to teach you how to fabricate and install DuPont™ Corian® correctly, per DuPont’s requirement, in order to maintain warranty coverage. It is also designed to help you work safety, increase productivity and introduce you to time saving tools and techniques. Please Click Here for more information or to have someone contact you."

Please note there is no “by” between “led” and “a”. Also, they meant to say “…designed to help you work “safely”, not “safety”. Besides the typographical errors, the paragraph is clunky and out of order. See how much better this reads and sounds in sixty-six words instead of eighty-seven:

"Successful completion of the Fabrication and Installation Training Course for DuPont Corian is a prerequisite of a potential customer becoming a DuPont Certified Fabricator/Installer for Corian. Led by a DuPont Certified Instructor, this project-based, hands-on training teaches manufacturer specified fabrication and installation techniques, essential for warranty coverage, as well as safety and increasing productivity. Please Click Here for more information or to have us contact you."
 
My rates are reasonable,

Joe