I am starting a small business selling handmade items- Right now I am selling on Etsy.com but am planning on getting a website up and running. I am looking to do something lie this:
http://www.potterybarn.com/
3 or 4 featured photos on the home site and different (general) categories on the top and the site map on the left side. My main goal is to make shopping EASY. I give up after 30 seconds of complicated online shopping and head to a different site. This means Big pictures and easy navigating. I have a few options... I can try to host it on my own through INTUIT (anyone have any experiences w/ them?) or a like program, I have moderate/intermediate computer skills, or I can hire someone to do this. If I hire someone to do this, any ideas of the cost I should expect? I know its not cheap. I've read a little about SEOs, are they worth hiring and what exactly do they do? Also, I'm looking for someone to design a logo/banner for me, anyone have a suggestion? Thanks!
Answers & Comments
Verified answer
This looks very much like a Wordpress theme. If you haven't heard of Wordpress, it is blogging software that is incredibly easy to setup and install. To turn a Wordpress blog into an ecommerce site, there are a few plugins that will do this. Alternatively, you could implement a shopping cart with Wordpress like Zen Cart which is equally user friendly.
Wordpress: http://wordpress.org/
Wordpress ecommerce plugins: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/search.php?q=e...
Zen Cart: http://www.zen-cart.com/
For your logo, if your not familiar with programs like Photoshop and Illustrator to do it your self, I usually tell people to check out http://elance.com./ Just post your specifications and designers will come to you. Feel free to send me a message and I can give you a quote on a logo, I'm not a designer but have done plenty of logos to know what I'm doing and my quotes are usually on the cheap side =)
File hosting and domain names are the cheap part, maybe 30-50 USD a month depending on your demands. I could try to find you some really cheap unlimited hosting, but it would take me a bit. I'm ok with html, but I can't design anything fancy like that yet.
You're going to need someone fluent in PHP, CSS, Javascript, MySQL. That can get expensive.
I'm good with hosting though, if you need me to go through my resources. email me @ [email protected]
I hope it will helpful to you for both development and SEO.