Two years ago my husband Jim and I began a publishing company to publish a book we’d written. We thought at the time we needed all the bells and whistles to launch our book and so we hired a prestigious web design firm to make our website for about $3000.

Our site was still not finished months after their estimated deadline because our company was continually pushed behind bigger projects, and eventually out of frustration, I just took over the site and learned to use Dreamweaver so I could finish it myself.

We also signed up for $99/month shopping cart and autoresponder which required a merchant account, another $30/month. We started our business with everything we thought we needed, but the truth of the matter is that we have still not had a return on investment through our on-line sales. If I had it to do over again, I would start simple, quick, and inexpensive with a blog-style website and I would use a free shopping cart solution such as Paypal, until the sales reached a certain level.

This experience has sparked my inspiration to help other small businesses, entrepreneurs or authors to begin their web presence with simple solutions rather than flashy expensive sites that won’t pay themselves off for months, if not years. My goal is to help you design a user-friendly site that will be available on the internet in a few weeks, and a site that you can learn to edit easily so you don’t have to pay a webmaster high wages to make minor changes or updates. You can upgrade later once you have reached a point in your on-line sales of products or services to warrant it.

I strongly recommend creating “blog-style” websites using a fully-customizable Wordpress theme called Thesis. Blogs are economical solutions to your web needs, not to mention their ability to harness more web traffic with the proper education and optimization.

Simple clean websites don’t have to break the bank. And they don’t have to take 6 months before they are live on the web. If you’d like to schedule a consult to discuss your ideas with me, please e-mail me at beth.hood[at]mac.com.

Aloha,
Beth Hood