website newby help

[anna95]

hi all can you advise on website costings I am new to business trading in new and nearly new baby stuff on a market trader I am considering getting a website to help my business as really struggling with sales at the min but unshore as all new to me lots of questions ie - how do they no were to find me and how can I sell on a website what are the set up costings and on going fees how can I get people looking on my site etc all confusing I have a mild learning disability and don't want to go back to the benefits system I want to do something for myself as find employment hard to get due to my disability

 

[Paul Murray]

Price varies wildly.

Selling via eBay or Facebook may be a cheaper option to start with, it really depends on your target customer. Once you've got a site running, you need to drive traffic and customers to it. Without a marketing strategy and budget behind a website though, it will just be an expensive waste of time.

 

[webhostuk]

You need to SEO optimize your website so that it ranks good in search engines like google, bing etc. You also need to make your presence on social media sites like facebook, twitter, instagram, linkedin etc to again addition traffic. Plus if you have funds you can try paid advertizement with google adwords.

 

[anna95]

thankyou for advise

 

[Paul Carmen]

It all depends on what you want to do with the website, do you want to sell products from it, or is it just to drive people to your existing stall by increasing your visibility?

 

[Nochexman]

Hello Anna, given what you have said I would consider creating your own website; I'm sure you will be able to find a local training course to help you set up.

 

[Wickham]

Personally I would go with the suggestion of Facebook, Ebay and even Gumtree. While you are establishing a customer base on these platforms you could watch Youtube videos on how to purchase and set up a domain name, set up websites with hosts and even a bit of code, HTML and CSS. It will give you some knowledge of what is involved and the correct vocabulary to use, just so you can ask the right questions for when you seek out companies and people who work in website design and hosting. This will help you and them, saving you both time and money.

I do know people who use Shopify for their online website. They offer hosted eCommerce templates and a huge array of useful plugins. I am told they are pretty straight forward, easy to set up and have a large community to help out should you get stuck. This seems to be a favored route for people with no website knowledge what so ever. From what I have seen it is a pretty powerful platform to base your business on.

One thing to note though is that there is a free trial account, how this works and what functions you get I don't know. I do know that when I looked at it in the past the fees were a little on the high side for me, so do pay attention to these should you take this route.

Like I said get yourself established by building a customer base on the free/cheap platforms, educate yourself a little on the next steps involved and maybe move over to a hosted website and/or an eCommerce platform like Shopify.

Youtube tutorials are a very easy way to learn new skills, I too have learning difficulties, but have learned so much from them.

Hope this is of help, good luck and remember it takes years to become an over night success!

 

[BusinessBoss121]

Build a small site for the search engines...they still harness most the decent traffic. You can accompany those with free social platforms and free ad/low cost add platforms like Gumtree, Ebay etc. Local SEO can be done quite cost effectively and that can be free to.