I am in the process of going solo and going legit, aka transitioning from being a Bucket Bob lol
I am going to start working on my website today and I am wondering what company you guys went with to host your website and your experience.
I am also considering using responsibid eventually or at least doing the trial but if there are other similar products that y’all have used, I would love to hear about them and your opinion.
As far as the website design, I have a cousin working on my logo as we speak and he is going to help me along the way.
Also another question, what photos did you guys use to start your website? Did you take your own? Or did you use stock photos you found online.
I want to use my own but for the life of me I can’t take a photo that looks as profesional as the ones I have seen on others sites. Most of the time you can see me looking like a idiot in the reflection of the window lol.
I use GoDaddy. It costs me like 200 bucks every two years for hosting and 15 bucks or there about per domain.
Build your site with wordpress, easy peasy.
I’d also use mostly your own photos. It makes your site look less corporate. Seeing you in the reflection should be NO surprise to a client, right? Also, learn a bit about photography, if you are going to take your own pictures, and eventually invest in a decent DSLR camera. It’s not hard, just takes practice and a little education. I have a Nikon J5 that takes pro quality photos, and it was about 500 (slightly used) with two lenses. It’s also fairly compact and can be stored in a glove box, if you have no room.
Then sign up with siteground to host it. I’ve used bluegator and hostwhatever and they SUUUCK. I do not like finding stuff in my directories that I didn’t put there. Their server security sucks. Siteground has been 100% for me and I like their service.
Then install wordpress from the control panel. Spend a day browsing through the popular themes on wordpress.org and download the one you like. Make sure it has been maintained within the last couple months because nothing worse than an abandoned theme.
Must have plugins:
Wordfence to keep it safe.
Contact Form 7 for email.
Recaptcha to protect against bots.
Yeah, when stuff appears in my DRUPAL directory, that’s messed up. There’s no way it came from the front so it had to come in from the back.
I discovered wordfence because plugins had appeared in my wordpress install. Wordfence is probably the only plugin that I would lay money down for. As a business, you can lock out ALL countries that aren’t in your target country. Those Ukrainian hackers be crazy yo. Oh, and I was AMAZED at how many hits there are on wordpress installs. It’s seriously insane. With wordfence you can sit there in real time and swat them if you wanted to. But I just set it and forget it and have it email me once a month or once a week depending on the install.
Blue and Gator are part of one giant company and there’s very few hosts that don’t belong to them. Siteground is one and I’ve been super happy with them. Dreamhost is another but the admin panel is really weird to me. I’ve got a friend who knew the founder of blue before it was sold and he’s got the hook up with like a bunch of mac-daddy accounts… that he refuses to use.
Wordfence is really good, no doubt. I’ve been learning to handle anything “off” from behind the shell now. It really helps when you have 70+ websites running on a server.
People think hackers and they picture some guy in a dark room trying in earnest to find a backdoor. Most people dont realize that every website in every far flung corner of the net is under constant, never ending attack by bots.
Wordpress gives you flexibility. Wix and square space are more of a patch job just to get something out there. But for seo and whatnot, wordpress is pretty much king.
Although, squarespace does have some pretty nice designs. I don’t really care to use them, but there are designers who specialize in squarespace designs.
friend said wordpress was dated and wix was outdated.
i had a site built yrs ago was dated so closed it down as services we offered evolved. we never relied on internet presence for business so didnt care.
now im interested in being able to zero in on particular services using the net
but i do want too design and maintain alone.
i spent yrs designing with acad so itll come back to me im sure. just picked up coral design program also
And that’s why I used Wix, because we all know that MS paint is so simple my 2 year old can use it. I just wanted the basics on my website: name, number, what I do, pics of my work, contact and reply information.
I would rather be out washing windows than laboring over a website. I’m also not the most proficient web guy out there- I don’t want to be. But yes, I have seen some beautiful Wordpress sites, and eventually may create one when I have more time (winters)
I like the xtheme. Really good package, great support and they have a lot of different theme templates that you can import and use as a starting point.
