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Don't know if upgrading is exactly the right word. I've had this online business for nearly 20 years. Current incarnation is the third, and this one totally redesigned. Have spent thousands of hours on this thing, and while we're not rich, I make a living.
I want to upgrade and take it international and much more professional and more successful. I'm totally self-taught. Do all the coding myself, only have one employee, really not doing the business I should but not sure how to proceed.
Without knowing your niche or products and services it's hard to give you tips. You can get a pretty good website designed outsourcing it to India say probably about 3k for a pretty decent ecommerce site. If you go with a local boutique webdesigner they normally wont touch a project for under 15k or 20k.
I used an Indian company, if you want a referral pm me. Most US companies just outsource to India and act as the middleman which don't get me wrong comes in handy, its a pain dealing with people in India via skype but its not worth 15-20k to have osmeone do it on your behalf, it's well worth doing it yourself, initially you may have to have some skype sessions at like 1am due to time difference but after that everything can be done via email.
I built a site using Magento (open source) and bought a template, which I customized myself. For a straightforward online retail site, this works fine. I used a couple of Indian programmers from Elance and odesk to add functional mods. Hosted online business services like Shopify save a lot of hassle and are well worth it, IMO.
No, I'm not going to pay anyone to do it. I have around 300 functioning pages online. I don't want to rely on anyone.
We really cannot help you as you have given us 0 information about your business or website.
WHen you say you have 300 pages are those content pages or is that products or skus?
Do you know what your doing with SEO and web design? If so more power to you. If not, 300 pages are worthless if htey don't show up in google searches and if you don't have them optimized propertly. Also, hiring a web designer doens't mean you give up control of your business. All they are doing is creating a site and hooking you up with magenta or woocommerce or something. You can still enter your 300 skus' and manage your own inventory and stuff.
I built a site using Magento (open source) and bought a template, which I customized myself. For a straightforward online retail site, this works fine. I used a couple of Indian programmers from Elance and odesk to add functional mods. Hosted online business services like Shopify save a lot of hassle and are well worth it, IMO.
I just opened two shopify stores in addition to my custom built wordpress site. One thing which bothers me is even though I opted out of accepting credit cards through them they are still charging me 2% of every sale. I'm already paying like $40 a month for my plan and they wanna take an additional 2% of my business and not even provide merchant services. thats my one beef with them. I do like how its basically wordpress dumbed down though
Both sales and content, including a free library of pdf files and web pages for teachers, several FAQs, Teachers, Luthiers and violinists/violists directory, an online magazine. Tons of stuff, too much, probably. We drop ship stringed instruments, cases and bows. 20 yo biz, does okay. Several thousand hits a day. Lots of social media connections. We show up on the first page of most searches.
It's not so much the design of the page as the general management. How to reach and ship internationally, and how to advertise. I am completely self-taught and it's probably obvious.
I just opened two shopify stores in addition to my custom built wordpress site. One thing which bothers me is even though I opted out of accepting credit cards through them they are still charging me 2% of every sale. I'm already paying like $40 a month for my plan and they wanna take an additional 2% of my business and not even provide merchant services. thats my one beef with them. I do like how its basically wordpress dumbed down though
aaah the "building a business on an island" mentality. Then there is the "build and they will come" mentality. Both wrong headed.
I always laugh when I see that commercial where they tell you they help build a website and cha-ching the register rings. Believe me, it's much, much more involved and costly then building a bunch of pages on a website. You'll need to make sure your server runs smoothly, SEO expertise or to hire SEO experts, advertising, programming, security, (china and russia love to send out ddos attacks), and on and on and on, and that's even before really drawing some real business. And if you manage all that and draw real traffic, then you'll have to upgrade your server, or are you using their server of that 2%?
If you manage to get some eyes on your site, then the dealing with the scammers, dealing with people who always want a discount, oh if you think 2% is a big deal, that's nothing, wait until you see how much of that the tax man takes.
@petch751: So correct. I've spent thousands of hours on mine, and it's a daily responsibility. Shopify has some nice features but you can diy for free. I pay about $100 a year for my host, and another fee for security.
Security is a huge issue, too. Our company is PCI DSS compliant. No customer data is stored on any electronic device, connected or not connected to the internet, and paper records of customer orders are cross-cut shredded six weeks after order is received.
I tried to teach myself SEO but got so bored I couldn't tolerate it. Just about every day I get an email or two from someone offering to do it for me, but I don't trust anyone to have our best interests at heart, and given that it's usually a form letter that doesn't even apply to our business and our search engine presence is already strong. . .
@petch751: So correct. I've spent thousands of hours on mine, and it's a daily responsibility. Shopify has some nice features but you can diy for free. I pay about $100 a year for my host, and another fee for security.
Security is a huge issue, too. Our company is PCI DSS compliant. No customer data is stored on any electronic device, connected or not connected to the internet, and paper records of customer orders are cross-cut shredded six weeks after order is received.
I tried to teach myself SEO but got so bored I couldn't tolerate it. Just about every day I get an email or two from someone offering to do it for me, but I don't trust anyone to have our best interests at heart, and given that it's usually a form letter that doesn't even apply to our business and our search engine presence is already strong. . .
$100 a year is nothing and if you do get serious traffic I doubt the server will handle it. At that cost you are sharing a server with a lot of other people who don't know programming and they could write holes into the programming for attacks that can then get you. No at this point your not ready for a dedicated server but if you get real traffic you'll need it.
As for SEO, I used to love it but it changes constantly and with so many responsibilities it's hard to keep up, the goal of the search engine is to give the searcher the most pertinent results. What ever you do don't use black hat techniques because they'll eventually get you. Aim for natural because using adwords and other ppc advertising is expensive and can eat up your revenues real fast and that's not even to get targeted customers to your site. A lot of it is using your software to place important key words in the right place then using important keywords "appropriately". Getting people to talk about you is also excellent but that's on top of excellent SEO.
If you are successful other people will come... to compete. It's a never ending battle and believe me, if you succeed, many of us know that "you DID build that".
Last edited by petch751; 04-21-2015 at 12:37 PM..
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