Posts

Site Design

 So this week was it, I started creating my very first web site.  I am more than a little intimidated by the whole process but as I get started I am finding I understand a little here and a little there and the holes I am learning to google them.  I started out following a video that was provided in the lesson material and had a mild panic attach when one of the plugins required to move forward was not available.  I took a deep breath and started looking at the options I did find and found one that had the Elementor program that he talked about.  So I loaded that one and thankfully found that it had a video tutorial on how to set up a web site.  The videos are going fast through the material and are assuming steps I have not taken but I am grasping the basics and will work with my nephew on the rest.  I am coming to understand that it is not as difficult to build a website from scratch and I may go a head and design one for my own company when this class is through but I do not think I

Site Builder & Hosting

 There is so much to consider when staring to build and design a website.  I grew up in a construction environment so I often find myself comparing the task or operation I am working on in terms of building a house.  The first part was trying to classify all the different companies into workable categories.  With the help of my nephew, I figured out that sites like GoDaddy, Bluehost, or HostGator are the ground upon which you build your house.  It is the dirt.  Then Wix, Weebly, or Wordpress are the house without any fixtures or furnishings.  The walls are there and the water and electricity is run throughout but there are no chairs, or pictures, and the walls a painted a basic industrial white.  The domain name is the address to the house so your mail can find you.  This understanding helped me compare apples to apples between the different items we were evaluating.  All my work was academic as I already had a server, and software available to me through my nephew, as web hosting is o

Affiliate versus Drop shippers

 I learned more about this topic than I ever really wanted to.  That being said it was a lot of great information that can be used to start a web based selling site.  It all comes down to what is your site going to be.  If you want a store then I recommend a drop shipper relationship.  This options does have some risk to it and can be more time consuming but it also has the potential to create more revenue because you get to set the prices on your website.  With greater reward comes greater risk.  If I wanted to start a web based selling site I would create a site that focused on something I enjoyed or felt strong about and then create affiliate links to products and sites that complemented my site.  There is less money to be made as the supplier sets the commission received upon a purchase, and the buyer must use your link to the product for that commission to happen.  I personally have seen a product on a website looked at it through the link then walked away to think about it, only

Choosing A Business

 When we started our first business, 30 years ago, we filled a need that was available.  A phone call looking for Rob's help with a project turned into a business with 20 employees.  We have been working an iteration of that first business ever since. So the idea of creating and running a web based business is daunting.  The information taught this week has been insightful and there are a lot of good web based business ideas out there, I am just not interested in any of them.  Working through the processes this week to come up with a business idea was enlightening.  I did not know there was a way to see how Google searches could be used to predict site traffic to a new web site or how a person could see how much competition in a certain industry there is.  It was also fun to see what mix of words could get you more hits.  Dungeons and Dragons got more monthly hits than Dungeons & Dragons.  I would have thought the other way around since & is in the actual book title.  I am