Need website Advice

[MorningHeirloom]

Dear All,

I am new member here.
I have been searching website design. There are many design and service out there. Many beautiful things. I have no clue which one is good for me.

I like to have e-commerce website, but I still have to add my Inventory and plan to add some new items, and the budget would be allocated for those.

Need some of your opinion :
What kind of hosting company work best in service and affordable?
Which website design template do you use? and How does it work?

Should I start E-commerce in the first place or just website and link to my Etsy shop and may be later I will upgrade to E-commerce.

Thank you,
Dia

[Former_Member]

There's no need to go all out for e-commerce from the start. This is what I would do:

First, register your domain name. You can forward it to your Etsy shop while you work on your website. I recommend Namecheap.

Get a small web hosting plan. I recommend the Baby or Hatchling plan from HostGator. That will be enough for a brochure site (simple site with general info, about page, contact page, link to Etsy shop, etc).

Install WordPress (free from WordPress.org) and build your brochure site. This will get your website indexed with Google and start building "link juice".

Once you feel you're ready, add e-commerce to your site. WordPress has e-commerce plugins so you don't have to change your entire site.

[MorningHeirloom]

Awesome! Thank You so much.

[Former_Member]

-- What kind of hosting company work best in service and affordable?
asmallorange.com offers a $35/yr plan that is nice and reliable. I also recommend namecheap.com for domain registration.

-- Which website design template do you use? and How does it work?
I use WordPress & WooCommerce.

-- Should I start E-commerce in the first place or just website and link to my Etsy shop and may be later I will upgrade to E-commerce.
Whichever you are most comfortable with. IMHO though, I don't think building up an ecommerce site is too hard.

[Former_Member]

I've just joined too and have questions about starting a website.

I already have a domain name which I got from GoDaddy and a hosting servicce from Hostgator. Everyone tells me it takes five minutes to go from there and set up a website. I have been struggling with this for a couple of months now and still don't know how to do it...

Also, I have 3 shops on etsy and I'd like to put them all on the website as 'pages' under my personal name (domain name)

Any advice??

[Former_Member]

Coco,

Hostgator should have a one-click installer like Softaculous. Look for it and install WordPress. Ignore the fields you are not sure about. Then you will have a site to add pages to.

[Former_Member]

Diana, I really need to start from scratch. Right now, I'm still having trouble signing on the cPanel. I just finished a live chat with Hostgator. Very frustrating.

I would much rather just pay someone to get it started for me....

[MorningHeirloom]

Wonderful Diane, Thanks so mucn.

I already have domain from Go daddy.

I am collecting the best pictures for portfolio, when everything finish . I will start to working on my website.

[MorningHeirloom]

Coco, I am agree with you..It is very frustrating since I have limited knowledge about website, html bla bla bla
for me my time is valuable to create new items and adding my inventory.
So ..let the expert handle..I prefer pay somebody as my budget.

[Former_Member]

html, html, html!!!!

[Former_Member]

Hey there,

A good alternative is to sign on with Weebly which you can build a website quickly using their drag and drop website building tools. They provide all the hosting needs for you so you don't have to worry about cPanels and other technical things.

Weebly hosts the website for you, and you can join them and build a website for free (you can upgrade to other premium functions if you find them useful).

Just purchase a domain name (there are a few suggestions above) and point the domain name to the Weebly website.

As for designs, there are a broad range of excellent and professional designs that are compatible with Weebly here - http://divtagtemplates.com/

Hope this helps!

Jeremy

[Former_Member]

Slow Down. You are trying to build a skyscraper and you don't even have experience building a dog house. You are not likely to be successful if you try to build a website with a shopping cart for your first website.

I also recommend building a simple one page website, as was suggested by someone else. No shopping cart, just a one page website that you can lead your website visitors to your Etsy shop.

Here is an example of a one page website without a shopping cart that I built for someone a couple of years ago. http:www.sfth.org

Just because you have a website doesn't mean that anyone will ever find it. You will have to know how to optimize it for the search engines (SEO). If you don't have your website optimized for the search engines your website will not show up on the search results when someone is doing a search for products like yours.

If your website doesn't show up somewhere on the first two pages of the search results chances are pretty slim that anyone will ever visit your website.

If you want to pay someone to design and build a website for you then you will be looking at anywhere from $99 to $500 per web page, depending on what you want to have on your web page.

Also, when someone designs and builds the website for you and you want to update the website you will have to pay them each time that you want to change a photo, change the text or create a new web page. You are probably looking at around $40 to $50 per hour.

I would also recommend having 3 websites instead of combining everything into one website unless the products are all very closely relalted.

Once you have your website online you will then have to market your website. If you don't market your website you will not be getting a lot of visitors. Marketing is something that you will have to do on a regular basis.