Building a better website.

Well maybe it would be more correctly stated, finding a web hosting site that fits my needs. There are many criteria’s that I need form a website; it must look good, easy to operate, able to sell work, and above all I must be able to afford it.

Websites are important in order to attract customers who are either wanting to buy your work or your services. In checking out many photographer’s websites I saw what I liked and disliked. What was easy to run and what was not so easy. I am drawn to the sites that is easy to load on my machine as well as easy to navigate. Believe me I found a lot of sites were that was not the case. In my world, and can’t believe that I am alone, I don’t want to have to think too hard to find what I want.

When I found a site that I thought was constructed well, easy to navigate and looked very sharp I scanned for a name to Google. Funny a lot of the good sites did not have a hosting site that I could get information from. Too bad so I did the next best thing, Google photography host sites. Now that I have done some research on what I liked in a site I could apply that knowledge to the array of host sites that popped up on my search.

First I needed to know what my needs were and what I wanted the site do for me. I thought I just wanted to have a gallery type of site that would not only have my photos but a blog for me to communicate with. But the more I though about it the more I did not want to loose possible impulse sales from visitors. So I started to look at websites that offered marketing and sales options.

When you talk about sales, marketing, placement of your site on search engines you can either find sites that have a great price but not so great templates, or high prices and great looking templates. Lets face it at this junction in my life I can not justify paying $500 a month for a site that I may not even get that in sales for the year. For the ones that I could afford more often I found they had cheesy templates which did not give off the look I was going for.

After some hours spent researching I found a site that was in my price range, had professional templates, marketing tools, easy to navigate for user and author, the ability to have a blog and link into social networks. I will leave the name out of it at this time until I am live and out there. During this process I will report back on the whole process of build and launching the site. Once it is up and going then I will let you know who I went with. I am hoping to get things rolling by the end of this month. I have $150 budgeted for the project and should have that by the end of the month. Keep you posted.