website cost expence

at this time we don’t have a place for selling woodworking projects.

-- ~ Debbie, Canada (http://www.execulink.com/~yohan)

I use in motion hosting. I spend about a $150 a year on it.

-- Mother Nature created it, I just assemble it. - It's not ability that we often lack, but the patience to use our ability

Websites are not at all very expensive. What takes time is getting traffic to your site. If you want to take some courses about websites lynda.com has video courses that covers it from A to Z.

-- If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured or far away. Henry David Thoreau

You will need five things to get a web site up and running.

1. A domain name (i.e. GateWayCustomWoodworking.com (mine)). This will cost up to $14 per year with multiyear discounts.

2. A web hosting company to actually host the web site. GoDaddy.com has economical hosting. Another is 1 & 1 (1and1.com). I use Godaddy. They are cheap but don’t have very good technical support.

3. A E-Commerce front end if you want to do the actual selling through the web site. Make sure this comes free with the hosting package you are purchasing.

4. A certificate registered to your domain name. This allows the secure transactions that e-commerce requires.

5. Someone to design and maintain the web site. You can use premade templates to do this (this is the cheap web builders that hosting companies sell), the problem is that they limit what you can do for page layout. You can hire someone to do your page. Make sure that they have experience with the e-commerce software from your web hosting company. Make sure that they understand that you own the site and code; and get a copy as they update your site.

6. Depending on your market you will need to do Search Engine Optimization (SEO). This is what gets you in the top half of either the first page or the second. Studies show this is where you want to be for people to visit your web site. This is a complex art.

-- Jesse, Saint Louis, Missouri

There are ways to set up and run a .COM website for
as little as $10 a year.

One good way to do it to start is set up a Wordpress
blog with your own domain: e.g. http://mywebsite.com

Then you actually list your items on Etsy.com and
use your website to promote the Etsy store.

It’s very important to understand that in order to
sell stuff online, you need traffic from the right kind of
people. In order to acquire that traffic you’ll need
to promote and/or advertise your website. Promotion
and advertising online is doable in dozens of ways.

The major “cost” of earning some money selling
things online is generally not the price of the
website hosting, but the time effective promotion
to drive adequate traffic requires.

Gene, I went up this path last year and also used inmotion which Monte uses, for me it was to much of a pain in the rear, hours of data entry and I never got any sales, only one sale for the whole year and that’s it, I found that I did better on ETSY then my personal domain and also I’ve made several sales from my facebook business page.

ETSY is very simple, when adding an item they take $.20 cents per item for a 3 month listing.

Just be prepared to do lots and lots of data entry, I just didn’t have the patience for it, I’d rather spend that time in the shop.

-- Randy - If I'm not on LJ's then I'm making Saw Dust. Please feel free to visit my store location at http://www.facebook.com/randy.blackstock.custom.wood.designs

@helluvawreck: I’m going to assume that you’re referring to hosting rather than actual site development. I’m a web developer and your statement is akin to me, as a woodworker, telling someone cabinetry is cheap. Just like custom cabinetry vs ikea, same applies with web dev, you get what you pay for.

That being said, there are many ways you can put up a site in an economical fashion. I would suggest exploring content management systems (CMS) or blog software like Wordpress (which can be hosted for free on Wordpress.org). They have plugins that allows you out of the box functionality for some of the things you want to do and you can get free themes in a lot of places to dress up your site.

I don’t think the OP is wanting to invest the time it takes to learn HTML/CSS (not too hard) to set up a custom site and JavaScript (much harder especially if you’ve never programmed before) unless that is his interest. There is also the whole “what’s your audience” question where you want to cater to every browser/Operating system possible on top of mobile. It’s NOT as easy as some think it is (just like anything in life really) and there is a lot more to it than just driving traffic to your site :)

That’s my soapbox about web dev and I’ll leave it at that.

-- Matt, Illinois, http://www.reintroducing.com

This all sounds way to much and to deep for me I like to make things not set here and type with one finger that is the way I got to do it so that says it all for me . I would like to know more about this etsy ??? Is that dot com oe net or what ? Thanks for all the info. Gene

-- Gene