Creating your own website
By Navigator member David Tonks, Director, Avocate Finance
I want to share some ideas on a web site application that has the potential to save businesses thousands of pounds in costs but also can generate thousands of pounds in income for their business.
Let me give you some background to begin with and why I am so passionate about what I am writing.
Over the last 3 years I have employed 3 different web designers and spent thousands of pounds, for them to create web sites that were inflexible and expensive. In addition, making changes to these web sites was expensive and SLOW. It would take days for my web designer to respond to my requests to makes change and then it would take days for them to be implemented and then I got a bill that made changes expensive to make.
This was not working .....The internet is all about working fast and keeping your costs low because internet customers are typically the most cost conscious customers in the market.
I looked for a solution and had heard of content management systems which allow you to take control of your web site yourself and allow you to add and change content as if it was on a word processor. I investigated several options based on my criteria, which was:
1) It had to be cheap, having wasted several thousand pounds with the other web designers, I had little money to invest in a 4th generation web site.
2) I am not a computer geek and so didn’t want to be confused with all the web designer jargon.
3) It has to be flexible to add as many pages as I wanted and change layouts as I wanted.
After dismissing several systems that cost thousands of pounds I stumbled across Microsoft office live (www.officelive.com). This is an amazing system that all small and medium businesses wishing to promote themselves on the web should be aware of
Why do I think it is so good?
· It is free!
· Once you learn the basics, it is as easy to use as a word processor such as Microsoft Word to update
· It is very flexible. I can add pages, make changes to content, add images and page layouts very easily and very quickly
· I have found the support function and community to be excellent
· It has applications for you to collect customer contact details, add video, slides shows, add images and many other useful applications can are easy to add to your web site
To be honest I would pay for this product, it is that good.
Have a look at two web site I have created for my businesses advocatefinance.co.uk and gobridgingfinance.co.uk which were created with NO prior web site or technical experience.
Try it for yourself, it at the end of the day it's free and this was what I did before I made the commitment to move web sites. I do have some tips that I want to share with you that I think will help you.
1) Get a professional brand and logo created by a graphic designer. Get them to save it as an image file (.jpg) and this means you can then load this image to your web site header and to other parts of the web site.
2) I also got my graphic designer to create my header for the web sites by creating an image file (.jpg) which has my logo and my phone number. They created it exactly for the width of the page (980 pixels) and I then uploaded it and I have a professional web site header for £35
3) Use professional images for your web site. I got my from www.fotolia.com and they cost me on average of 35p to 75p each and there was thousands available for every business
4) Take time to think through your layout of the web site and what colours match. I took time to look at web sites from the The Times, The BBC and consider the layout with the AIDCA principal (create Attention, Interest, Desire, Conviction and Action)
5) Once you have your layout, create a web page and save it as a template so you can use if all other web pages.
How it has helped my generate leads and thousands of pounds of income
Having a content management system allows you to react very quickly to your marketing ideas without needing the technical expertise of a web designer. The benefit of office live is that is it a good system and free..what more do you need.
I have used it to react very quickly and to test marketing ideas and initiatives at little or no cost to me. For example I have recently added two pages to my web site that have targeted niches that I wanted to explore. The cost was just a few hours of my time researching the niches and then creating web pages. I then created two pay per click campaigns and literally with hours. The results were impressive with to date over 50 enquiries and income already in the thousands of pounds.
I am presently researching additional web pages to add to me web site that will target new niches and additional profit opportunities.
If I didn’t have office live, I probably wouldn’t have do this because the process to employing a web designer meant that testing these opportunities was expensive and slow
Useful links
Microsoft Office live – www.officelive.com
Microsoft office live support forum – http://ask.officelive.com/smallbusiness
Forums, videos and email support that I have found excellent
www.officelivespages.com - useful information
http://oldesigntips.com – Tips on designing your office live website
http://solutionsforofficelive.com/default.aspx -
Another useful site that has information on adding google analytics code
David Tonks MBA CeMAP CeCM
Director, Advocate Finance
www.advocatefinance.co.uk
Tel 01206 544333 Mobile 07914 405338 Fax 01206 544133
Email: David@advocatefinance.co.uk
Advocate Finance is a leading Business Finance & Commercial Mortgage Broker. You benefit from professional and impartial advice and access to over 100 lenders. They also offer bridging and short term secured finance, for more information visit: www.gobridgingfinance.co.uk
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