? About Websites/Business Plan

Shaun Carollo

Shaun Carollo

Slave to Swirls
Is it worth it for the weekend/summer detailer to have a website? I want to project a very professional image since I am only 18. I really want people to take me as seriously as they do the 40 year old guy down the street, if not MORE serious.

-Shaun
 
Business name , some type of motto or saying , your name ,phone number, email and web site if you have one. The area/area's your serving.
 
how much does it usually cost to set a website up? i am a weekend detailer too and have a limited amount of funds. im just looking for a basic website, nothing spectacular.
 
I have looked into www.godaddy.com (superbowl commercial) and found that it will cost about $40 to register the domain for 2 years, and $9.99 a month for basic web hosting services.

Thanks for the responses,
Shaun
 
register a domain (godaddy are pretty cheap) -- learn some basic HTML or find a mate who knows a bit of programming and get him to whip you up something quick :)
 
rollman said:
Business name , some type of motto or saying , your name ,phone number, email and web site if you have one. The area/area's your serving.
Click to expand...


Sorry Wrong thread .

My take on it is

A web site can't hurt your part time business endearor . Whether or not you can afford to set one up and maintain it is another thing. There's plenty of software that can walk you through building your site , maybe you have a free homepage with your ISP . Doing it that way wouldn't cost you anything, they have setup wizard software you can use to build your page /pages .

Another way and they one talked about here is, register a dot COM domain and use a frontpage type of software to build your site. Of course you have monthly hosting fee's to pay but they can be cheap . Godaddy has hosting for as low as $7 a month . You could also register a dot US domain which is cheaper . I just did one not long ago and it cost me $26.84 for 2 years.
 
I used godaddy for my site. I was just going to use them for domain name but there hosting deals were great compared to the other place someone recommended. I also took advantage of the web site tonight program (for additional fee) to get my site up and running asap. Now I have a web presence and I can take my time learning HTML and build a site that is a bit more polished than the one I have now. I chose this route rather than learning and building a site at the same time. To me this projects a better image and I don't have pages with "under construction". This would turn people off for the brief time I have their attention.

My site cost $55 and change. That's domain name plus private registration (I paid it to keep the "whois" private, might be a load of BS), web site tonight (5 page), and one year of web hosting at $3.19 (base package deal) a month I think. The best part The site was up and running within hours. The hosting also gives you plenty of email addresses so I used scub@mydomain... for my email address.

Changes are simple to the web site. My site is cookie cutter but you can change colors, add albums... to make the site different from the template.

Hope this helps. Good luck.
 
OCDetails.com is hosted by 1and1.com. I don't get much search engine traffic, but that is ok. The main reason I built it was so I could put a URL on a business card and people could go there when they had a chance. You can't really carry around your portfolio of work with you to show to people. Its much easier to put your prices and examples of your work on a website and just slap that on the business card rather than try to give them all that information on the spot. My site kind of evolved beyond what I had originally intended, but its still on my business card. 1and1 was incredibly cheap and it came with some great software to build the site. No html knowledge is needed and there are many resources for novice webmasters to use. You could have your site up in a couple hours with them. But, like I said... for some reason they aren't very search engine friendly. I don't get traffic from Google or anywhere like that. If you are just a weekend warrior then high traffic is the last thing you want anyway. Just try to avoid free webspace services. The URL is usually 40 miles long. Buy a domain you like and find a webhost that wil give you enough space to build a good website and handle some traffic.
 
That's not true. I got OCDpharmacy.com ranking high in Google for free. The only ones that pay to get listed are the ones on the right hand column.
 
If you google my comapny name Diamond Detailing, I absorb the top 3 spots normally. I have a decent website at www.ddetail.com (slightly under construction) that costs me $10/month for a little over a Gig of space.

If anyone is really interested in a nice professional site, shoot me an e-mail at mgleeson@diamonddetailing.biz and we can talk. I am not a "pro" but i have more experience than some pro's :lol:
 
I am thinking about getting a website myself (just for fun) and went to www.click-worx.com. They are offering a free 2-page website. I guess you can't go wrong with that. If you don't want anything fancy, they have templates that you can use to get a site built in a few hours by yourself, no programming skills needed.

The catch is (of course, there is a catch) that if you want something more than a 2-page website, then you start paying for hosting fees and stuff...
 
I just hosted my website. Domain registration 5 years @$25 through yahoo. Webhosting $3.95/mo for 5gb space, 50gb monthly traffic, email, mysql, unlimited subdomains...quite a bit actually, great tech support. www.ace-host.net . They give a offer a pretty good service so far. Now I just need to LEARN how to set up the site and make it look good. Frontpage sucks, or so I suck at frontpage possibly (but i really dont like it :) ) Hope this helps!

edit: by the way if your looking to see the site you can find my under construction page, as well as a very BIG copy of my business card at www.tspdetail.com

Edit again!: FYI I also paid 3 years up front to get that price, which was like $142.xx.
 
Your card/site looks good.

Two things.

1. For your email you can use your domain as the email account. For example, your email is tspdetail@gmail.xxx. You could make that mark@tspdetail.xxx and loose the gmail free advertising and really push your web presence and email. I picked this up from some pros at another forum. Seemed like a good idea to me.

2. One of the books I'm reading about web design says to minimize "site under construction". To get potential clients to go to your site takes some advertising. If you don't have the site ready when the potential client visits you might not get them back for a visit when the site is ready. Most people will judge your site and whether to stay usually within 30 seconds. I used the template method to have a full site rolled out when I put out my advertising (flyer). Its cookie cutter with some customization. This allows me the time to study and build a better site. I'm not raggin here just passing on info from other pros that I learned from about using the web.

Good luck
 
I don't see anything wrong with the gmail accounts. I could have 500 @ocdetails.com accounts, but I use gmail on my card because it is a better email service than my OCDetails.com email is. its a lot more reliable than my ocdetails email is. It doesn't say anything to me that someone is using a free email service instead of their domain email. I certianly wouldn't make a determination on if their services were any good.

6000+ hits on OCDetails since I put that counter in and not one cent spent on advertising. ;) Likely people aren't going to stumble onto his site yet anyway. There isn't anything for search engines to pick up on. The only way people are going to find it is if they click the link like we did. Having it say 'UNDER CONSTRUCTION' isn't going to hurt anything until there is more content on there and the search engines crawl the site.
 
I do use my domain email as well and will. I like the fact that gmail is easy to check anywhere, as I cannot always log into my control panel from work to check domain email. I use info@tspdetail.com as my secondary address. I already have a decent amount of clients that contact me through gmail so it's not a huge issue to me. I'm working hard on getting something up quick for my site.I havn't done a hole lot of massive advertising so there arnt too many people looking for the site yet. As well as my only form of advertising is my business card (and well the web site from people who see the card). I have 2000 of those cards printed full color front and back so I think the gmail will stick for now. This is all besides the fact that I am still the ONLY detailer in the area that uses email let alone a web site. So I've got the competitive advantage over my 3 competitors (one who may be out of business, not sure, lol havnt been able to contact him in a while after his phone was disconnected.)

Thanks alot for the input though, any criticism is good criticism to me and always greatly appreciated.
 
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