advertising?

Hi,

From start to finish how long does a web site (business) take to get up and running. And do you wait until the web site is finished to start advertising or as soon as the web designer starts work?

Thanks

Jayne
 
C

clickprofits

Depends what type of business and how fast your web designer can build the site. I wouldn't do any advertising until the site was ready though. If it's an e-commerce site (selling products) you will need your suppliers, stock, shopping cart provider and payment processor to all be sorted. A small shop with a limited selection could be up and running in a month in theory - IF your web designer is ready to start asap. Bear in mind that search engines may take months to index your site so if you are looking at Christmas shoppers then you will probably have to pay for most of your traffic one way or another (pay per click on Google & Overture, Affiliate Program, other advertising, etc) as well as making the most of options like PR and getting other sites to link to you to speed up indexing and ranking on the search engines. Submitting your product feeds to Froogle should also bring you some shoppers.
 
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How long is a piece of string? :)

As clickprofits says, it depends entirely on the type of business, the type of website, the type of designer, whether you need a database, who your target audience is...

In general I would advise against starting to advertise before the site's finished because the nature of the web is that people won't bookmark and return to a site that's still under construction when they first visit it.

I think you're doing a good job of building anticipation already though: I think we're all desperate to know what it is now :)
 
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Some of the others on here told me not to tell, in case evil onlookers pinched my ideas. I am busting to tell, getting very excited. The business is nothing special to others I think, but to me it is. I've always been in partnership, this my first go alone :D I just need something to keep me busy while the site is done, hyper at the min'. :D

Jayne
 
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epiphany

Free Member
May 15, 2005
793
0
Scotland
Depends where you want to gain business from :)

If you want to get it from the internet you can start gaining customers with Google AdWords straight away.

If you want to gain them from Google searches you will need to put in a lot of work over many months.

If you want to gain customers from more conventional means then that's not my field so no comment :D

Personally I favor Google searches as its free, self sustaining and it only costs me my time. :)

If you need to discuss the feasibility of your idea in private you know you only need to pm me :) You are safe in the knowledge that I barley have time to sleep so I won't be stealing your idea.

Terry
 
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Jayne,

What everyone else has said is really valuable but one of the most important things is not to rush it. Make sure everything is 100% sorted and in place before you announce its launch.

Once you 'go live' and all your marketing methods are set in place it will be far more effective and rewarding rather than doing things one bit at a time.
 
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DuaneJackson

Free Member
Jul 14, 2005
8,642
1,100
Brighton / London
Yep, the text is picked up, but so is lots and lots of other stuff.

If it's your ranking in search engines results pages that you are concerned about (SEO) then my biased opinion is that this is something worth outsourcing to a professional. I'd normally plug my own company but we're having to turn down work at the moment becuase we are too busy. But there are plenty of other SEO's here.

You can certainly do the basics yourself and read up on some of the more advanced stuff. But for best results, outsource.
 
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DuaneJackson said:
Yep, the text is picked up, but so is lots and lots of other stuff.

If it's your ranking in search engines results pages that you are concerned about (SEO) then my biased opinion is that this is something worth outsourcing to a professional. I'd normally plug my own company but we're having to turn down work at the moment becuase we are too busy. But there are plenty of other SEO's here.

You can certainly do the basics yourself and read up on some of the more advanced stuff. But for best results, outsource.

Turning business away, what are you like! Contract it out and tell them you did it :D I wonder how many years it'll take before I get too many customers :lol:

Thanks for the help :D

Jayne and you yetti :lol:
 
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webit

Free Member
Jul 13, 2005
1,124
7
Brighton, UK
epiphany said:
Personally I favor Google searches as its free, self sustaining and it only costs me my time. :)

It takes time. Google is now using it's index of our site for the first time in three months. 10,200 pages in site:www.webit.net. We were having loads of problems getting it listed even though the google bot was a regular visitor. First of all we had 302 redirects on many of the pages that should have been 301's. We had a second site (www.webitnet.com) that used the same content as webit.net. Both of those than de-list you from Google.

In the end of course, it could just be that the Google process took 3 months ...
 
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DuaneJackson

Free Member
Jul 14, 2005
8,642
1,100
Brighton / London
Jayne said:
Turning business away, what are you like! Contract it out and tell them you did it

Nah, tried that. Didn't like it. I'm a bit anal about quality of work and customer service and haven't yet found anyone I can contract stuff out to that I'm confident will do that stuff to an adequate level.

We lost a small fortune last year when I tried this. The sub contractor just wasn't up to scratch on the level of coding (too many security flaws), and I spent ages redoing the whole project. Obviosuly the client never paid any extra. Since then we've made a profit from the customer but on the basis of the initial work it was a big loss.
 
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