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WEBSITE will it benefit our business
I have been thinking of having a website made, from the little I know to have one working well you need to be able to maintain and update it. We are a small business here just doing the run of the mill kind of stuff, would it really have any advantage and justify the cost of a good site over a bog standard job.
Russ.
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20 Replies
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unless you plan on promoting your site pretty heavily Russ, I wouldn’t spend too much on the site at all.
I use mine to have a presence, but I only average a few emails a month that actually brings in any work
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Hi Russ
we didn’t know whether to get a website or not, as we wanted one which we could up date ourselves & didn’t fancy spending a fortune.
If you want a basic site you can build & maintain your self have a look at http://www.moonfruit.com. We bought a package from here & I have to say that it is brilliant, so simple to use!
Our site is just set up so people can look at previous projects & see the sort of stuff we do.
hope this helpscheers
Neill
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Hi Russ,
As Shane said, to generate work from it, a site needs to be promoted heavily and constantly updated The only advantage I see of having a web presence it when someone calls enquiring ‘do you do banners etc.’ they can see samples your site.
As long as you don’t expect too much from a site, I would say that using it as an on line ‘brochure’ with a few pages showing some of your work is the way to go without too much expense
Pat -
Hi Russ
I never knew anything about website builds but I do have knowledge of design software’s like Corel Draw etc. I bought Microsoft Frontpage 2003 off E-Bay for about £20, bought a domain name from 123-reg.co.uk for about £2.60 / year, £1.59 / month for web hosting and £25 / year for Frontpage Extensions (to be able to use it to upload to their host site)
So in total it costs me about £70 / year to host and build my own site, Frontpage is so simple to use.
This is however for a simple information website but like has been mentioned it is great to use and update as often as you like with pictures of jobs done and general information about your company and what you can offer.
I’m still new to signage so can’t say how valuable it is.
Hope that helps a bit
Warren
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do it..!!
it has high initial setup costs, ours was £500 plus the domain name and space rental, but it is a very good sales tool.
2 things:-
you need to take good quality photos of your work, not just scanned photos, digital originals in high quality.
have the website designed properly and have it ‘search engine optimised’ so that your website has the best chance of being found through google.
When you consider the cost to advertising in yellow pages its a bargain.
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Hi, like many people in here I host with http://www.1and1.co.uk and for the £4.99 per month plus VAT I get all that I need.
Benefits:1. I got my own domain name and therefore control over e-mail addresses
2. Tons of site building tools for doing it yourself free with the package
3. Analytical software to capture customer data
4. This is my shop windowAgainst
1. Needs constant updating (static sites drop down the rankings)
2. Needs some knowledge to optimise the site
3. Currently cost neutral i.e. sales from the site cover site costs.I do not use my site to boost customers, merely provide a window on some of the goods I produce. If that is all you need, by all means go to the likes of 1 and 1, however if you are planning to capture new customers, then you will need help.
Regards
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Russ the first thing you need to decide is what you want from your website, do you want to have a site because you feel that you should have one to help your company’s credibility or are you looking for new markets like mail order?
If all the work that you do is local and you want to keep it that way then you really just need an online portfolio of work you have done with a little about different types of signs that you can produce and you can build a site very cheaply yourself using some of the online web hosting companies. Most of them now provide an option to build your own site and the software is all drag and drop so you don’t need to know anything about programing at all. Everything is done for you and controlled by you so you can update as often or as little as you wish with no extra charges. Have a look at http://www.123reg.co.uk this is just one example but there are many other companies doing the same thing. The main problem with these sort of deals is that most of the web optimisation done is for the host company not you so it is unlikely that you will feature highly in search engine rankings but if you only need an online portfolio that you can point potential buyers at it’s not really a problem
If you are looking at using your website to generate you a lot more business then you are going to have to spend more money. in this case you would be better off going to a company that specialised in website design but shop around a bit as there are a lot of people advertising their services as web designers who are completely useless. Ask them for examples of their work and don’t just look at the sites yourself, try to find the sites by using the sort of keywords you would use if you required that sort of service and see how the companies they have done work for rank in the search engines. Theres no point having a great site if it is ranked number 100,000,345 because no-one is ever going to look that far!!!
If they are not on the first two pages the chances of anyone contacting them is quite remote.
The other thing you might want to ask about is updating the site, some companies will not let you update the site yourself once it is built and up and running but will do it for you at a cost, others will give you the option where for a slightly higher initial fee they will build the site and then hand it over lock stock and barrel for you to maintain but you will need to be a bit familiar with the software used in order to do this.Hope this is of some help, if you need to know anything more specific just ask.
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I bought my domain name from GoDaddy.com, it includes a free site.
I think it was about $20?
My site, even tho it was made by me, and is totally amateur, has been a huge help. The templates are limited, and it was a pain to figure out, but I persevered.
I use it as an online portfolio.
It has helped me "sell" myself and my work over a YP ad or cold call.
Love….Jill -
Avoid Easyspace like the plague! I’m sure there not anything to do with the Greek guy that runs all the easy stuff but avoid them anyway.
I thought I has secured a .com and was paying for the package for more than a year, (I even renewed my subscription, and they let me pay)
before I went to start uploading a temp web space.Well, after alot of hassle and phone calls, fob offs and cover ups because there was obviously something wrong, I eventually did some serious homework and finally got them to admit that they had ****** it up and some domain company had snapped it up.
I don’t even know it I ever owned my domain and I cant afford the lawyers fees to make them pay or explain properly what happened.
I was well pi88ed and all I got from them was one years subscription back.
Nothing for what i considered my creative property, that was mishandled.
REMEMBER: EASYSPACE 👿
Jimmy.
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OK easy space 👿 THEN 1and1 😛
If you have webspace as part of your ISP package you can easily redirect your domain name. As I said before I have been very happy with 1 and 1, and I have quite a few domain names with them. You also receive quite quickly your Nominet certificate that proves you own the domain name. All aspects are easy to manage and apart from last weeks hiccup Ive had no problems in the past 4 years.
Graeme
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quote signsurfer:do it..!!it has high initial setup costs, ours was £500 plus the domain name and space rental, but it is a very good sales tool.
Sounds about right for a commercial website developer for a couple of pages! Could’ve done it yourself in Frontpage or another webdesign package…for nothing except basic costs.
quote :2 things:-you need to take good quality photos of your work, not just scanned photos, digital originals in high quality.
not required as you HAVE to reduce most of your content down to 20 – 30k per image or a 100k at most if you want it to load fast / be ‘browseworthy’.
quote :have the website designed properly and have it ‘search engine optimised’ so that your website has the best chance of being found through google.you can do this yourself…for free, or that feature is included in your hosting package.
quote :When you consider the cost to advertising in yellow pages its a bargain.At £500 – not really – everybody looks to Y/P or Yell.com for suppliers, it’s more readily available. Paper Y/P generates at least 50 times more local work for me than a search engine, if I spend £500 in yellow pages I KNOW I’ll make many times more than that back…do the same on a website..hmmm,not so sure unless you branch out into UK wide sales of stickers…. If you can crack Yahoo, MSN, Ask, Alta-Vista you’ll be well on your way…Google doesn’t appear to be ‘pro-signmaker’ in their searches 🙁 for the most part.
I host with 1and1.co.uk Despite their Email fiasco last week they are cheap, relible & easy to work with. Expanding into sub-domains and other domain names is a doddle & very cost effective. I host 5 websites on one £7.99 package. Brilliant!
Another handy tool is to get listed by DMOZ….
Websites are a great tool for a portfolio or point of contact for some customers. Rather than explain for ages what you do…suggest they look on your site. 1. It makes you look MORE professional & less fly-by-night / cowboy and 2. It gets them off the phone so you can do some work!Just my personal take on it.
Dave
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WOW what a fantastic response thank you all for the first class advice, I am now sure that the best thing for our business is a basic site that will showcase the work we have carried out. This will help us as mentioned mainly with potential new customers. Now do I have ago myself or farm it out, either way I now have some very helpfull guide lines to work with.
Russ
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Russ I would say do it yourself, Dave uses 1on1.co.uk and I use 123reg.co.uk both look to offer similar packages at about the same price and as I said before they make it very easy for you to design and update your site. If you farm it out you are still going to have to do a lot of the work yourself as you will have to provide the pictures and also any text you require as I doubt a web designer will know that much about signs.
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we use our web site purely as an on-line portfolio of previous work, allowing
us to talk through various designs and ideas with our customers while we are both simultaneously browsing our web site – saves a lot on mailing product information sheets and it is more spontaneous.building the site ourselves wasn’t really an option for us, so we used a designer who’s website design work, we thought suited our market and
we weren’t disappointed.also consider using a designer outside the UK – our designer is based outside the UK so we are paying for a quality design service at cheaper price than you would get in the UK.
😀
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I have to say that we got our website professionally developed.
It is more than a couple of pages, as we decided that the website would act as another salesman – and because of this we have a built-in e-commerce section where you can purchase our signs, and even customise your own sign should you wish. Everything in inclusive on our site now, all designed to use the same theme, including a newly added blog.
(mod-edit) has a lot of pages attached to it though, mostly dealing with all the kinds of sign we produce. As I said, it is professionally developed and from being nowhere on Google/Yahoo we now sit on the first page of the search results for the keywords we targeted (i.e., aluminium signs, wide format printing, modular signs, no smoking signs, and so on).
It -IS- worth the money as we have started to see in the past few months. Don’t go with a "do it yourself" approach, that’s like saying that building your own car from scratch (when you know nothing about cars) can compete with a Jaguar.
Remember that the impression someone gets from your website will last forever. If they don’t like it, or aren’t impressed, they won’t come back or contact you for signs…
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sorry david (rogers) I cant agree with your comments on my post, I have ‘been there and done it’ spent hundreds of pounds on software to make my own site, bought books and then spent 2 weeks trying to understand it and write a site, it looked OK and lasted 2 years but was nothing like what we have now, a professional looking site. The £500 cost remember is a one off cost not yearly, I expect to get 3-4 years at least out of my current site, the updating bit is only ever changing the photographs which my designer does for a small fee once a year.
I have landed a couple of nice clients from the professional look of the website, remember it is the first impression of your company that they will get and you have to make them confident. have look (mod-edit) see what you think.
And if you do a search for (mod-edit) you will see we rank quite highly on most popular search engines. This is not something we maintain constantly but is the way the site has been optimised. -
I would have to agree with Dave’s comments, having had a look at your site it is not difficult to create a site like that especially if you have spent a lot of money on software, I don’t use frontpage but I do know that it has a lot of very professional looking templates so it is quite easy to give yourself a professional looking image.
Yellow pages covers the area Russ wants to work in which is local, he is not looking for worldwide coverage at the moment so Yellow pages is far more likely to produce a much better return on his money as it is still more widely used at the moment, in the future things may change.
if you only need your site to act as a portfolio then a high search engine listing is not that important and as Dave has pointed out you can do it yourself using the tools provided by some of the hosting companies. Even when you pay to have a site optimized it is no guarantee that you will be high up the rankings, I couldn’t find Signsurfers site on google anywhere in the first 3 pages, if I were a customer I wouldn’t look any further than that unless I was really bored.
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Martin – what text are you using as a search criteria
signs stockport
engraving stockport
screenprinting stockportall come up first page, its impossible to cover every single angle from all over the country, but then I dont want to be national, plus yellow pages has a very small area coverage in my area, manchester is split into 3 books and there is also a catchment area for south merseyside.
but at the end of the day the proof is in the pudding, I can recall 3 clients off the top of my head who we have gained through the website and have commented on the quality of it, in the past 18 months they have probably spent at least £6000 with us, so from a £500 investment its not a bad return, and because somebody else designed it, there was absolutely no hassle, all I had to do was provide the pictures and approve the designs.
In this day and age I dont think you can afford NOT to have a web presence, and the final result comes down to what professional image you want to portray. -
To get your self up the rankings takes time and directed effort. Firstly your "Meta key words" (and phrases) must be well defined within your page header. If you are using IE as a browser, just click on View and the Source. You will see Robert has carefully selected words and phrases to describe this site.
Manually submit your URL to search engines e.g. in Google, click on "About Google" on their home page and then select "Submitting your Site"
Another tag to insert is the ROBOT tag as follows:
Where to put the Robots META tag
Like any META tag it should be placed in the HEAD section of an HTML page:
<html>
<head>
<meta>
<meta>
<title>…</title>
</head>
<body>
…What to put into the Robots META tag
The content of the Robots META tag contains directives separated by commas. The currently defined directives are [NO]INDEX and [NO]FOLLOW. The INDEX directive specifies if an indexing robot should index the page. The FOLLOW directive specifies if a robot is to follow links on the page. The defaults are INDEX and FOLLOW. The values ALL and NONE set all directives on or off: ALL=INDEX,FOLLOW and NONE=NOINDEX,NOFOLLOW.In addition to all that is above, look out for FREE business advertising sites as they tend to pay to be listed higher and frequently place you business at the top.
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Paul (Signsurfer)
No disrespect intended! Nice site you have there, well placed too.
My comments were NOT to have a dig at you, your methodology or decision to spend money to develop an existing site, just MY personal experience in the matter.
What RUSS is planning on is starting from nothing. I don’t know his budget, his market etc., so gave my take and opinion based on my local market, and as a small company that would not benefit overly from a ‘commercially administered’ site. I like being in control – to add, take away – go in a different direction, upload work as it’s completed etc. on my own schedule, at my own pace, at no cost. I KNOW my site isn’t as good looking as yours, but it’s cost me nothing…just time when I’d otherwise be twiddling my thumbs!! My existing customers do not expect a flashy site, just competent signmaking. About 60 to 70% of my work is repeat or recommendation, and in general I use my site to get people off the phone as I can’t be bothered spending half an hour explaining the difference between flat-cut & moulded letters!! 🙄 Work directly from it is minimal – mainly sub-contract fittings & repairs from ‘down south’ – it’s enough for me.
It’s a presence, a tool for me…not a revenue generator…yet!
Dave
ps. Graeme – adding in a ‘robots.txt’ file can also aid in the robots, webcrawlers & spiders.
A typical example (dumped into the root directory)
User-agent: * [allows ALL search engines access]
Disallow: /cgi-bin/ [denies robots access to specific folders]
Disallow: /images/
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