spikeachu Posted October 17, 2011 Share Posted October 17, 2011 I disagree. I think as a diy'er if you are prepared to learn and want to learn about seo and traffic there is info out there to do marketing and learn about it. Yes you can pay someone to build you a site, I had a quote for over £2000 to build a site then seo services were on to and extra £50 + per month and then other things on top of that. I am really happy with the site I have created, it looks proffessional, it takes orders, allows people to paty a deposit. I can track visits through analytics and other software such as stat counter and is all seo enabled, so as I learn and google changes, the site can be changed and its all included. I would be paying MUCH more to have what I have if I had paid for it to be created.......... I suppose it's all in the eye of the beholder. Personally, I see a site using the same platform as ours, which costs me nothing. I still get all the benefits you describe above as they are all free services or included in the OpenCart platform. I'd actually be interested to find out what the design company is doing for their £7 p/month. As for SEO included with OpenCart, this is a very limited module which makes the URLs more friendly to an end user, but this does little for your search position. A quick search on Google for 'Wedding Cakes Sheffield', which I would expect your site to rank highly for, doesn't find you in the first 5 pages. Outside the first 2 pages and you might as well not be listed at all. Having a professional looking website that nobody can find is analogous to placing Harrods in the middle of the Sahara. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Bunderson Posted October 17, 2011 Share Posted October 17, 2011 What do fellow small businesses think? Is paying to have a professional money well spent in your opinion? Did you have an expensive website and did it increase your business or not make much difference, What are your thoughts on this? I don't think price has anything to do with it. You can download yourself a free template and edit it in notepad to display your own text and logo. It's what the site does that counts. If it isn't properly worded or using the correct key words, then nobody will be able to find it on search engines. What you need to spend money on is SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) so they your site appears as high up as possible when someone searches for your key words. Having a domain name with your key words in also helps a lot. So does getting other companies to link back to your site. Ask to trade links with local businesses. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Shef_Fitness Posted October 21, 2011 Author Share Posted October 21, 2011 What are peoples opinions on Vistaprint? HOw easy is it to use, and is it as easy to format the text, create tables like you would if you were using using Word? I know there are different levels to purchase (more expensive) at vistaprint, and I am tempted to go for the most expensive option. I don't want to find out the software/formatting the text is as difficult to use as the package I use now. What are peoples thoughts on Vistaprint? the main question being the ease of formatting the text Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
R.B Flooring Posted October 21, 2011 Share Posted October 21, 2011 I have no idea if an expensive website will work better then a cheap one. Luckily for me a friend did me mine so it cost very little. I'm happy with it and the main thing is i've been quite busy for a good while. Not all of my work has come from the website but it's proven a very useful thing for me. I've just tried to make sure people can find the site easy like having it sign written on my van bigger than my phone number. I think a web address is easier to remember then a phone number. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
angie58 Posted October 21, 2011 Share Posted October 21, 2011 I do understand that the platform is a free one, and that if I wanted to go it alone I could do so an pay less than I am currently for hosting. However as I am completely new to this, have never built a site before, I needed and still do need support building my site. The site was launched a month ago which is why it s not on the top pages of google, as I am sure you know this does not happen over night! The people I am with have not only shown me how to use the admin system of opencart, they have done all the design work for me to my requirements, which I wouldnt have been able to do. They have set up my email, they have given me valuable advise and been on hand as and when I needed a question answering, even evenings and weekends. Seo is again all new to me and I undertand there are tools to help, but as I want to learn it I am entering keywords, descriptions, seo urls etc myself after leasrning bit by bit from easysite. They are a fantastic company who I will be with for a long long time. I guess if you have some background knowledge and are happy to go it alone then you can do also. But I am more than happy to pay slightly more for the support package. I also looked into places like vistaprint and create who are £10 plus a month and have less features and from what I hear alot less support. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Love2print Posted October 21, 2011 Share Posted October 21, 2011 If your just interested in text formatting maybe you should get a developer to set up a site for you using Wordpress. If you don't want any e-commerce or advanced features then it's probably your best bet. I use it for my blog and find that the text is easy to format. There are also plenty of templates to choose from. I use one that can be customised so I could match it to my main website. You can also create a fixed home page and create extra pages, you don't need to use it as blog. I suspect it would be cheaper to get a developer to set up a Wordpress site for you in the long run. The Vistaprint site would cost you £107.64 a year for the most expensive option. You might want to get some quotes from some web design companies to find out if it would be cheaper. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Sparklyfairy Posted October 25, 2011 Share Posted October 25, 2011 I built my own website by buying a package from 123-reg.co.uk, I'd never done it before and found it very easy to do. The support from 123 is great also. The hardest bit really was getting it in the search engines under something different than the company name, as people need to know your company name to google you and well if they knew that, then generally they'd already know your website one would think. So I found having an eBay shop and blogging on blogger.com helped loads. Dont pay for the google Adwords, you can end up with huge £300 bills every month (this has happened to quite alot of people I know). My site is easy to navigate and is full ecommerce, costs me £18.99 a quarter - bargin! Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
richard Posted October 25, 2011 Share Posted October 25, 2011 If you get something off the shelf then you get what everybody else gets. In a lot of cases that is fine. But if you then want to do something special, like a loyalty scheme, or link in with another service (facebook, twitter, mailchimp, a helpdesk) and the off-the-shelf version doesn't have that feature then you may have to start again. However the off the shelf stuff may have some features that effectively tie you in should you want to change platform. Also some off the shelf solutions would end up more expensive over 5 years than a custom built site as the hosting for the off the shelf stuff is harder. Also, if you are one customer of 10,000 and you have a problem you aren't going to get the customer service of a company that has maybe only 100 customers. There are technical things you would want to know about, like SEO, and how many domains are on the server hosting your site. Taking one of the links from above love2print.co.uk I popped their IP address (178.18.116.47) into this tool: http://www.domaintools.com/research/reverse-ip/ And I discovered that love2print.co.uk shares it's server with 284 other websites. If one of those other 284 websites is hacked into, or is a resource hog, then love2print.co.uk is affected. I have seen servers which host over 1000 domains. Also if security is a big deal, then you will want to research about any security break ins on the platform of your choice. Wordpress is good insofar as you will be able to find out about all the problems it has had over the years, other off-the-shelf solutions may simply cover up any problems as the website owner and the off-the-shelf provider both have an interest in keeping such information to themselves. Obviously some of these issues are important for some companies and less so for others, if you are a startup and want to get going with the minimum of outlay then you are going to need to go down the cheapest route while you get your business established. If however you are going to be investing thousands in setting up your business and you will be using your website to sell goods then you probably need to invest more heavily on the website side of things. Web designers and developers are paid well for their work. £500 is probably no more than two or three days work around here. Having said that you may well find a new business who needs the work and can offer some very good prices. I hope some of that helps. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kyung Posted October 25, 2011 Share Posted October 25, 2011 A professional looking website certainly reflects well on a customer.However, I once bought a car new from a website which was pretty poor looking. The reason i did that was because the new car was the least price compared to all the fancy websites selling the same thing. the only thing the poor looking website did was make me triple check the validity of the business behind it before i gave them 12k cash. But the thing i took away was that maybe they were cheaper because they hadnt spent so much on their website? Was it safer? Kind of - because it made me triple check - i didnt take it forf granted. But, times have moved on, the bar is setm, and your customers expect a good web experience. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
walkertelecoms Posted October 25, 2011 Share Posted October 25, 2011 I built my own website by buying a package from 123-reg.co.uk, I'd never done it before and found it very easy to do. The support from 123 is great also. The hardest bit really was getting it in the search engines under something different than the company name, as people need to know your company name to google you and well if they knew that, then generally they'd already know your website one would think. So I found having an eBay shop and blogging on blogger.com helped loads. Dont pay for the google Adwords, you can end up with huge £300 bills every month (this has happened to quite alot of people I know). My site is easy to navigate and is full ecommerce, costs me £18.99 a quarter - bargin! It's upto the customer how Mich they pay to Google, if they haven't done their homework I can imagine it getting out of hand. £300? I pay a tenth of that and people searching for my services see me either at the top or usually the top 2 or 3 of the first page. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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