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Website developer recommendations

Dark Lord

pfm Member
Hello all,

My wife runs a couple of small businesses and we would like to set up two websites to promote them. One of them is a small retail business, the other is a consultancy,

We had one made (via a portal linked to a developer in India). To be honest we were underwhelmed with the results. We have had professional photos done, a lot of the copy and a domain name for the retail website. We will need to set up the consulting one.

Is there anyone here who can help or recommend. We will obviously pay for the services, but we are hoping for a steer in a good direction as we have had our fingers burned before.

The reason for not doing it ourselves is that we are time poor, and we have a 2 year old. We will however, learn wordpress (which I believe is the basis for the site we have at the moment)

We appreciate any recommendations

Regards Devraj
 
Last edited:
Dev,

WordPress as the content management system with a theme from ThemeForest ought to give you a site with the look and functions you want with a very reasonable investment in time and money.

Joe
 
I spend 000's a year on websites, If you just want a simple site, go with Joe's recommendation above. You can easily spend big bucks so learning to do it yourself on teh sofa when the 2yo is asleep in the evenings would be superb fun and save you thousands.

I'd remove you're email address from your post above Devraj - you'll get spidered by google and sold on!!
 
I’d recommend Shopify for a retail business and for portfolio or marketing websites that don’t require content management I develop mine in Adobe Muse. Wordpress is like cracking an egg with a hammer for smaller websites...
 
I've used Wordpress, Weebly, BigCommerce and Shopify in the last 5 years. For time-strapped people doiing it themselves, Shopify is the one out of those 4. You'd probably find in a couple of 4 hour sessions on it, you have something you like. Wordpress locked me into paying someone every time I wanted to change even minor stuff. If it involves much more than drag and drop type design, I can't do it.

Paying all the time for edits really pissed me off.
 
For the consultancy side I can recommend: https://under2.agency/

For the retaIl side, and speaking as a digital marketer for many major retaIlers, I would set up an eBay store and/or Amazon store first. The reach is just so, so much more than a new site, and no need for expensive paid advertising to get visitors to the site. Of course margins need to be considered i.e. eBay fees and Amazon commission.
 
After getting your website published it is important to get it to the top of the Google search results. A friend acheived that by frequently updating the web site, He set up a routine on his mac to make a trivil change some where in the web page and then reload the page.

The program was called Automator.
 
For the consultancy side I can recommend: https://under2.agency/

For the retaIl side, and speaking as a digital marketer for many major retaIlers, I would set up an eBay store and/or Amazon store first. The reach is just so, so much more than a new site, and no need for expensive paid advertising to get visitors to the site. Of course margins need to be considered i.e. eBay fees and Amazon commission.
Just on that....We started with the 3 at the same time, store, ebay and amazon. Ebay was initially 100% turnover. Then for a couple of years, it was ebay 60%, amazon 20%, store 20%. Now it is ebay 65%, store 35%, amazon go fxck yourselves.

I'd say you need one of the 2 channels just to get the revenue in and to see if there is actually a market. And you should be able to tell which one to go for by looking at competitors. If you are unlucky, it is amazon. But you need your store content up there too. It starts to rise like a cake without necessarily doing anything to it, to a 'degree'. Then you turn the gas up later with some seo, google ads sales campaigns etc.

I'd like to hear your thoughts on instagram. I've just committed myself to sorting it once and for all, now I can tag my shopify listings to the pictures. it is, therefore, a free traffic asset and can't be shunned any more. Thing is, the weight of anti-social media can be a pain. Like the channels, I can't do them all.
 
After getting your website published it is important to get it to the top of the Google search results. A friend acheived that by frequently updating the web site, He set up a routine on his mac to make a trivil change some where in the web page and then reload the page.

The program was called Automator.

Can you put a link up? I can't find it.

I now have an app that rotates my product pictures every month. Google shopping is why, not the 'organic' searches. When you think about the situation, and how google has changed from the friendly neutral guys into a mercenary machine, I can't see the point in working the organic seo stuff any more. If google gets money from its advertising, why would it ever let organic searches get in the way of that. And to say people ignore the ads etc, is naive. They don't. And if they did, google would make sure they did not. The amount of effort required to pick up the scraps in the organic searching is not worth the prices I have been quoted to achieve it, or the amount of resource I would need to put into my website if I did it myself. I only ever get involved in direct traffic driving now. At the moment, instagram.

So SEO becomes one project among many in the attempt to get traffic. And it is always the hardest, most expensive one. Eg, I set some ads up on the French version of gumtree. It took about 3 days to sort 80 ads out, and now I get about 1500 a month in store sales off them.
 
Richglib - a link for what the ap it is part of the Mac OSX offering in the Applications folder, for the website that used the process, my friend has sold the business, I do not know if it is still operating.
 
Richglib - a link for what the ap it is part of the Mac OSX offering in the Applications folder, for the website that used the process, my friend has sold the business, I do not know if it is still operating.
Ok thanks. I saw that and wondered.
 
After getting your website published it is important to get it to the top of the Google search results. A friend acheived that by frequently updating the web site, He set up a routine on his mac to make a trivil change some where in the web page and then reload the page.

The program was called Automator.

Nope, that’s not how it (SEO) works...

Everything in SEO can be broken down into three key areas:

Findability - can the page be crawled and indexed?

Quality - are the right trust factors in place, such as real business details, Ts & Cs, privacy policy, Google My Business listings in place? Are other high quality websites linking to you? Most domain-level trust factors are actually driven by off-site factors (links and citations)

Relevance - are the keywords and themes accurately described on-page, including the page title, and match the searcher’s intent?

There are some areas such as “QDF” or Query Deserves Freshness, in which case time-sensitive content can rank better. Changing a few words on a page isn’t what this is about though.
 
Interesting reading this as I've:

A) Always done my own sites by traditional/simple methods like write a page and use FTP to put it up.

B) I get spams telling me all the 'failings' of my pages, which are clearly clones of standard spiels and regard my pages as being for a 'business'. They aren't and I'm not trying to 'compete' with anyone else. Hence no 'business details' at all.

C) The emails are stuffed with jargon and seem just wanting to bafflegab the victims and intimidate them into paying someone to 'expertly' 'improve' their site. The mentions of SEO make me wonder if someone will also come up with a 'WTF' Factor everyone must worry about. 8-]

I recall being at a meeting with MoD people where some of us had sweep on how many TLAs would get used during the meeting. We then debated if TLA was a TLA.

Sorry, couldn't resist. Afraid I can't be more helpful as I've not used any webfirm, so none I could recommend based on personal experience. But I know some other people who are happy with WordPress.
 
My favourite is when non-web people are having a go at trying it for themselves, ask a question on a forum what to do and the answer is that you should not do anything as you clearly have no idea and you should get an expert in. Then there is usually a spat between the experts in the same thread about what is good SEO and what is not.
 
One thing I'm not clear about is the extent to which different search engines employ differing methods, etc, for ranking and giving results to users. FWIW I never use Google, and prefer DuckDuckGo. With webpages I tend to go for KISS and assume their methods can parse text well enough to get some idea of the content of pages.

That said, I guess pages that use 'google analytics' may help push them up rankings. But it isn't an approach I like very much.
 
One thing I'm not clear about is the extent to which different search engines employ differing methods, etc, for ranking and giving results to users. FWIW I never use Google, and prefer DuckDuckGo. With webpages I tend to go for KISS and assume their methods can parse text well enough to get some idea of the content of pages.

That said, I guess pages that use 'google analytics' may help push them up rankings. But it isn't an approach I like very much.

Do you mean you think websites that have Google anytics enabled are more likely to rank higher?
 
Yes. It would serve Google's interests if they do. Remember, *we* are their 'product'.

Makes zero difference whether a site uses Google Analytics or not. Same with sites using Google Ads, big spenders don’t benefit in organic search, directly. :)

...it does stand to reason that a website that is very heavily doing paid advertising can gain greater awareness and exposure, which can lead to more links and citations being generated, so second-order SEO effects.
 


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