Start Me Up! - Part 5
Wedding Belle Monday, December 14, 2009 at 4:01AM As promised, the topic of this week’s post is creating a website for your business.
When creating a website, it is important to start with a concept or idea of what you want. Start with a list of things you want to display on the website, a list of things you want people to be able to do or find, and a basic idea of how you want it to look. A good way to think about that is to take a look at similar websites that are out there and make a list of things that they include, there are tons of wedding planner’s websites for you to visit. You definitely want to include contact information, an explanation of services, and when possible some client testimonials. Regarding pricing, you may or may not want to include this on your site. It is a personal preference, but I personally am a fan of including at last a starting price point, this is purely for efficiency and so prospective clients know off the bat if you are in their range. If my prices start at $2500, it is not beneficial for either party to have a 45 minute conversation only to realize that their budget is $1000 – just an example.
Next, you will have to decide if you want to try to create the website yourself, or have someone set it up for you. Nowadays, there are plenty of easy to use tools that will help you get started on your own. But if you don’t have the time or would like some help, there are many people that can get you started on a limited budget. A good idea for finding help, if you don’t know someone who has the skills necessary, is to put an ad on craigslist and set a price you are willing to pay up front. Many web developers can get the job done quickly on a contract basis.
If you are more interested in setting it up yourself, you can check out some free website tools online. Wordpress.com is a blogging platform that is free to use and very popular. They provide you with a very intuitive and simple platform to create a website that is unique and will cover all of your needs. Similarly, sites like weebly.com, terapad.com, and geocities.com have free website creation tools.
The other thing you have to consider here is hosting your website. Wordpress.com and similar services will actually host your site for free, meaning they will provide their own servers to run the site when it goes online. If you want a little more control, or you want to do more than just display information, it might be a good idea to register your site with another paid web hosting company. Godaddy.com and Hostmysite.com are two of the cheaper hosting companies, but there are thousands of options available. A quick google search for “website hosting” will provide you with a huge list to choose from.
One of the most often overlooked aspects of setting up a website is choosing your domain name. This is increasingly important as a simple, easy to remember domain name can be important to your branding and marketing campaign. Even before choosing the name of your company, it is a good idea to think about the name of your website, as the two should coincide, and websites must be available. Godaddy.com allows you to search any domain name to see whether or not it is available. The trick is to make it simple, descriptive, and easy to remember. Once you have the domain name, you will have a better idea of how to brand the business.
A website can be one of the most important factors in a successful business today. When you are in the planning phase, make sure to work this into your strategy. Set aside some money in the budget to get started with the website creation. We can devote a whole series of blogs to the creation of a website for your business, but this should be enough to get you started. And speaking of blogging, we’ll get to that too! Until next week…
xx,
Belle
Reader Comments (15)
I completely agree that starting with an overall concept is key to a successful website design. If you at all skilled in Photoshop or Illustrator you can save on website design fees by creating the overall look as a starting point. Good luck!
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