Welcome to the Cake Decorators Q&A

hi,

I need a website for my business but after several quotes, the prices range from £1,400 to ‘you can just do a free one’.

i don’t want to do a free one and then not be found anywhere on google, but I don’t have much of a budget to put to it at the moment.

Yell have quoted me £20 per month with an initial consultation fee of £150

or wordpress have quoted me £20 per year with a £700 set up fee.

Doug Richard from Dragons Den has recommended wordpress on a couple of his seminars I have been on but does anyone have any other advice please?

thank you all,

Nicola

x

Hi Nicola,

Oooo finally a question I can answer 🙂 We use wordpress here and there is loads you can do with it for free or with little expense however I’d recommend you use someone to help you get a site set up and looking nice and also give you some training on how to use it. One of the big plus sides to wordpress is how easy it is to use and keep your website upto date and changing all the time. There are also loads of plugins that you can install to give you extra functionality for example there are pleating of Search Engine Optimization plugins you can use to make getting you on page optimization sorted really easily.

Where are you from? I could recommend some wordpress devs I rate very highly here in central Scotland.

What do you mean by wordpress have quoted you? Is that a wordpress developer?

I would say you wont find someone to set you up a site for much less than that. In my experience. It sounds like you would be paying over the odds for hosting but again its not that much of a mark up. You might pay £10 a month or so for hosting directly to a hosting provider or maybe a bit less even.

You could go it alone with wordpress if so Id check out:

http://www.bluehost.com/ or http://www.names.co.uk/ I use both of these and have been fine with them. I register domain names with http://www.fasthosts.co.uk/ but you could do it the with same company you host your site with.

I would take a look at http://themeforest.net/category/wordpress and http://www.woothemes.com/ for some really nice premium themes. (chances are if you go to a wordpress dev he or she will use a theme and either just set it up for you or modifie it to your needs. You are not likely to get a totally custom theme for under 1k.)

It really depends on how much you want to take on yourself to be honest i’d get some help getting set up but learn how to use wordpress you dont want to be paying someone £50 per hour to make slight changes to content.

One piece of advice no matter what direction you go down. If you don’t already have nice photographs id try and find a keen student or even pay a professional to get some really nice images.  No matter how nice your site is it wont look great without great looking content and with cake decorating this is even more important.

In the upcoming pro membership I’ll be covering this topic in a lot more detail as well as some of the fundamentals of marketing you cake decorating company online.

I hope this helps

Kind regards

Paul Doffman

Customer Support

I done my own website and used vistaprint. They give you optional extras such as search engines an stuff. I found it really easy to do it myself that way I could add my pics when it suited rather going through a 3rd party.

hi Paul,

that’s great advice, thanks.  I am in Bristol, a recommendation of someone I can talk to would be great, I always prefer recommendations for things like this, it’s getting really confusing!  thanks.

I am awaiting the pro membership I emailed last week regarding this so am going to join, it sounds really good.

thank you very much for your advice and time, I will have a look,

kind regards

Nicola

Your Little Village Cake Company

Hi Nicola, I am planning on using 1&1’s website builder, which you can do for £9.99 a month. It’s based on templates that you can customise yourself. There is a free 30 day trial so you can see if it will give you the website you want before you spend any money!

Hi Nicola, I am in the process of a free months website with vista print.  Not doing too well with it Im afraid 🙁  I keep getting an error msg when trying to make changes and it is really really frustrating.  Iam going to have a look at 1& 1, thanks Doodlecake.xx

Hi have you got a solution yet? we may be able to help you out there. Let me know…