Since the job market is so incredibly awesome, I’ve decided to take the tiger by the tale and open a business of my own. The area I’m looking at should limit my start up costs to about $2k or so which is manageable. So my first option is where do I go to have my online presence. I’m thinking of either Squarespace or Wordpress as I have zero coding skills, but there are plenty of online tutorials and help for both. Seeing as it is likely I will have to employ others at some point, I’ve got my attorney (guy I went to high school with but is very successful. He’s giving me a pretty good break on his fare.) getting the opening moves on getting a Federal tax ID number so I can have a license in this state. I already have my local business license.
So what is the consensus for features and reasonable price? Ideas? Anyone have experience with both?
I will have a merchant account with Visa/MasterCard, but do not foresee taking payments online. The web site will be mostly informational, ways to contact me, the occasional video/post update, etc.
Wordpress can do everything you want it too, although you might need to try a few themes first. (Many themes support a static front page, and have the blog on a secondary page, too, which you’ll probably want)
You also MIGHT have to venture into the stylesheets to tweak something (like colour or column width), but you can google your exact question and someone will have done it before.
For hosting, basically any decent web hosting will have 1-click setups for wordpress - $10/month is the high end of what you’d pay for that. Dreamhost or similar works fine.
Depending on your business, you might be able to get away with just a Facebook page. You can setup business pages that are visible by the public for those few that do not have Facebook. For the vast majority that always have the FB cookie in their browser you will be able to see hits, engagement, track likes, etc. Later you can engage in advertising with FB. It’s free (I think) and could make it a breeze to get going.
My wife did “social media” on the side for her desk job for a few months and most of the companies engagement moved from their static “wordpress-like” page to their FB page. Most people just seemed to like that better.
FB advertising is not free, unless something recently changed. You pay to get your ad inserted in others’ news feeds. You can very specifically target various demographics.
Bearing in mind FB pages are usually semi-functional unless you’re logged in…so you need to consider your target market
There’s alternatives to squarespace such as weebly.com or wix.com. I don’t know how they compare to squarespace but maybe one of them has the right plan for you.
I don’t have as much to offer on the web-design front (I think Wordpress is perfectly serviceable and is a very popular and well-used platform meaning that A) you can easily find people to work on it if need be, B) it’s supported by tons of OTHER platforms well, and C) you can find lots of great materials on how to do neat stuff with it online easily), buuuuut:
I worked two (hellish, soul-grinding) years at one of the larger merchant services groups in the US. If you have any questions or concerns about that side of things, feel free to ask on here or via PM. Can’t promise I’ll have all the answers, but I might be able to provide some tips :)
I don’t want to be the sole dissenter but I don’t think you should put any time in DIYing your own website and focus on growing the business itself. I’d go with just SquareSpace and Facebook.
All of the suggestions above are great – and something to think about conceptually is what is your brand? Will a DIY site be able to reflect what your brand is? Can it grow with you?
Full disclosure: I run a web hosting business (poehosting.com), so if you go the host-it-yourself route (WordPress doesn’t have to just be on wordpress.com), then feel free to PM me and I can get you a discount.
Not to pimp POE hosting, but they’ve hosted my business site for more than a decade, as well as the site of a client of mine. They’re solid, and Patrick is great to work with.
I hosted a site with POE Hosting for years and never had so much as a hiccup. Patrick always gave quick responses to occasionally dumb questions and could not have been more helpful.
My wife just lost her job so she and a coworker decided to open a small business. Is wordpress still the best option today to build a very simple website?
Also, what a good hassle free hosting option? They’d rather not have random ads with the page. Is that possible with a limited budget?
Oh, and where would one go to buy a domain name?
Wordpress certainly is easy. You can go to Wordpress.com to get a hosted site and probably buy the domain name there, too. Should be cheap to have an ad-free site.
Personally, I use Google Domains for registering domain names these days because it is straightforward and they don’t try to upsell you. Check whether Wordpress.com requires you to register the domain name there before proceeding.
Squarespace is another easy option.
There’s also places like Wix and Weebly, Who offer free website builders and I guess some degree of hosting, though I don’t know how well they would satisfy your desire to be add free and cheap at the same time.
I’d add SquareSpace to the list, and one that’s specifically a little directly focused on small businesses, but I think their free offering, if there even is one, will be fairly limited.
WordPress is certainly relatively easy to use, but powerful and broadly supported enough, that you can start small and basic and scale up with it. Unless you’re going to have a dedicated person with existing expertise working on the site, I’d strongly recommend going with a WP-hosted variant, because WP is riddled with vulnerabilities and attacked by hackers constantly due to its ubiquity, and keeping it and all its myriad plugins and add-ons up-to-date and installed as per latest security recommendations is more than a novice should make themselves have to deal with.
I have a WordPress blog, but get tons of spam bots that get past the plugins/filters. Very annoying! I only get a handful of actual human visitors.
That is what I was going to mention. It seems like there is a big WordPress vulnerability/hack at least once a year.
Arise! I published a translation of Eugene Onegin last year and, admittedly belatedly, I’m putting up a website to connect myself to that and let readers find other stuff I’ve written and contact me through a gmail email account. Essentially, it’ll be about 4 pages–home/I translated this book, about the book, other publications, and bio/contact.
My priorities for the website (in order) are cheap, easy, stylish.
I don’t have a domain, so that’ll be part of the thing that needs to be cheap.
I’m thinking of using Google Sites to design it and Google Domain to get the domain. I think Sites will also host it–or am I getting that wrong?
Honestly, I have no idea what I’m doing, so am I missing something that’s going to cause expense and headaches later? Is this a good plan? The Wirecutter suggests Wix, but $150/year is beyond this budget unless they really provide something super magical I’m not seeing.