Is a Website a worthwile investment?

[Grind4012]

Hello,
I am new to this forum, but I have been "lurking" for a few weeks.
I own/operate a Stump Grinding LLC primarily on the weekend(s) and after work.

I have often thought about adding/creating a Website to compliment my other advertising, yellow pages, craigslist, local paper and an occasional circular. Problem is that I would need to have it built and hosted as I do not have the expertise to perform those tasks. Having a Website built, designed & hosted can cost some big money. (too me anyway)
For those of you that have a website, would you say it was worth the expense? Also note that I am working "part time".

 

[lawnmowertech37]

Hello,
I am new to this forum, but I have been "lurking" for a few weeks.
I own/operate a Stump Grinding LLC primarily on the weekend(s) and after work.

I have often thought about adding/creating a Website to compliment my other advertising, yellow pages, craigslist, local paper and an occasional circular. Problem is that I would need to have it built and hosted as I do not have the expertise to perform those tasks. Having a Website built, designed & hosted can cost some big money. (too me anyway)
For those of you that have a website, would you say it was worth the expense? Also note that I am working "part time".

well you just want a info site more than anything correct ?

i happen to have dreamweaver on my computer i may be able to use a basic html site one page or three you just have to supply me with the details of what you want on the site

but as far as cost you just buy some parts from me and i will make you a site for free

and i will find a way to get the files over to you only thing you will need is a hosting company and there are many out there that cost very low costs
http://www.justhost.com is a cheap hosting company i been with them for a year now with a different site i own and had no issues

there support is on the computer and they get to you in less than 12 hrs with a answer and they have live help on there as well
those guys at just host has a program in the cpanel that designs your own website in minutes
you can take a peak what it looks like here

http://www.chainsawpartslists.com

that is the site that is hosted there at justhost

and that is the free design tool you get with the standard package

 

[ATH]

Yes. The better question is: is a yellowpage ad a worthwhile investment. Welcome to 2010

There are many many free tools out there. A couple of examples.

I just redid mine using a system called WordPress (www.wordpress.org): my site: www.advancedtreehealth.com This tool is not necessairly designed for traditional business websites, but it can work well for that with the correct theme (template). YOu can even download Atisteer for tree to make your own theme. I tried it, but couldn't get what I wanted with it. There are thousands of plugins to do what ever you want with it. After I learned WordPress (self-taught), I also did our church's website www.crosspointfindlay.com with it. I actually like that one better than my business site...lots of good plugins that I used there.

I host through bluehost. First couple years are 3.95 per month (if you shop around and find a link from another advertising site) and 6.95 after that. That also includes a domain registration. Bluehost does have some free tools, but I have never used them.

Microsoft Office Live offers free hosting and free tools to build a site. You will need to pay for domain registration.

Having said all of that, if you shop around, you can probably find somebody to do you a simple site for $250 or less (then you'll have to pay for hosting). I'd suggest you not have your hosting dependend on the designer (so if you don't like one, you can leave and keep you site/domain name).

 

[lawnmowertech37]

Yes. The better question is: is a yellowpage ad a worthwhile investment. Welcome to 2010

There are many many free tools out there. A couple of examples.

I just redid mine using a system called WordPress (www.wordpress.org): my site: www.advancedtreehealth.com This tool is not necessairly designed for traditional business websites, but it can work well for that with the correct theme (template). YOu can even download Atisteer for tree to make your own theme. I tried it, but couldn't get what I wanted with it. There are thousands of plugins to do what ever you want with it. After I learned WordPress (self-taught), I also did our church's website www.crosspointfindlay.com with it. I actually like that one better than my business site...lots of good plugins that I used there.

I host through bluehost. First couple years are 3.95 per month (if you shop around and find a link from another advertising site) and 6.95 after that. That also includes a domain registration. Bluehost does have some free tools, but I have never used them.

Microsoft Office Live offers free hosting and free tools to build a site. You will need to pay for domain registration.

Having said all of that, if you shop around, you can probably find somebody to do you a simple site for $250 or less (then you'll have to pay for hosting). I'd suggest you not have your hosting dependend on the designer (so if you don't like one, you can leave and keep you site/domain name).

you are purty good at wordpress where do you get the different templates

 

[ATH]

Thanks

The credits for both themes (templates) is in the footer. The business site I found through much googling. The church site I found by looking at other church sites which led me to the theme's author's site (Living_OS) where I found the one I used. FWIW, I did check the link at the bottom of your site (which also looks very nice) and see that templateworld also has wordpress themes.

(I would probably have been 'legal' just having the themes credited in the code, but they were helpful enough that I thought it only right to leave them more visible...)

On the advancedtreehealth site, I added the 'slideshow' separate from the theme. It is a plugin called vSlider. I had another one that rotated random images, but I couldn't get it to look right on multiple browsers...

There is a learning curve to wordpress like anything else...but once I got that down, I feel like I can do what I want with it (except make myself more aesthetically creative).

 

[ASD]

The rule of thumb used to be if you were not in the phone book u were a fly by night co! Now days if you don't wave a web site you are. We no longer have add's in the ph book we just do web based stuff and mailers and are saving HUGE $$$ as we used to run 1/2 page add's in 6 books and we tracked it for 2 years and found that 90% of our calls were not coming from the ph book add's and that is where 80 % of our add money was being spent! Now we spend only 30% of what we use to and get 10 x the calls / bis

 

[lawnmowertech37]

The rule of thumb used to be if you were not in the phone book u were a fly by night co! Now days if you don't wave a web site you are. We no longer have add's in the ph book we just do web based stuff and mailers and are saving HUGE $$$ as we used to run 1/2 page add's in 6 books and we tracked it for 2 years and found that 90% of our calls were not coming from the ph book add's and that is where 80 % of our add money was being spent! Now we spend only 30% of what we use to and get 10 x the calls / bis

same here i dont advertise in the yellow pages yellow pages is of yesteryear the old way to advertise alot of people use internet to search alot of online buyers too so being on the web is a better solution than being in a phonebook that costs every month between 30.00 on up to 600.00 depending on ad size craigslist is one good free way of advertising

i sold some ayp belts to a local guy by putting the ad on craigslist

so also the local newspaper is a good source

costs cheaper than a phone book ad

word of mouth another good quality advertisement T - shirts with your business name and all another good way
yea once i get my images back on the site during our upgrade from the older version to the new version most of the images got lost in the process i say ouch cause that is over 4500 products i got to go thru one at a time

 

[Buckettruckbabe]

Web presence is a MUST

Our entire business is driven by the internet because we sell to North America. Likewise, optimizing that presence for Google Page Rank and position is also a huge factor for us. (competition)

From a local standpoint, you can take advantage of lots of Freebies, as mentioned, Wordpress is a great vehicle, ranks well in Google and can get you noticed.

I recommend that you purchase a Domain name (GoDaddy is the easiest and you can set it up to automatically renew) Roughly $30. Anymore, it's recommended that you use a keyword rich URL, versus your business name. This can be transferred to where you host your site/blog.

www.stumpgrinding.com (for example) You can check and see if the domain is available, or you can opt for your business name.

www.Webs.com is free and has design templates. It's designed for people who aren't webmasters. You can transfer your domain name so it's just like a regular hosted website and to do that costs $50/year.

Bottom line, you don't have to spend a fortune on webdesigners and webhosting. But in the age of technology, it pays to have a web presence.

Yahoo Local, Merchantcircle, etc. are other freebies you can take advantage of too.

 

[Grind4012]

Thank You for the response's, all good ideas and suggestions.

Now, I need to do some more research!! Good thing it is winter and we are not grinding. Gives me time to check this stuff out.

Thanks again.

 

[af7850]

...optimizing that presence for Google Page Rank and position is also a huge factor for us. (competition)
...
Yahoo Local, Merchantcircle, etc. are other freebies you can take advantage of too.

Great suggestion. If you want to start on a dime without needing to know the mechanics of web design, this is what I think will work best.

Start with Merchant Circle. Great service, and you can get a starter site (no ppc ads, limited coupon creation, one physical location) for free. They have great built-in SEO too, so if you spend some time building all of the free features they offer (newsletter, blog, testamonials, etc), you should be able to quickly show up near the top of Google rankings. You will need to know a thing or two about keyword weighting, though, but we can cross that bridge when we get to it.

Next, get yourself an express website name from a decent place ( I use www.cheap-domainregistration.com ), and forward it to your Merchant Circle site. Forward it in "masked" mode, and when somebody types in "www.yoursite.com", it will forward them to your Merchant Circle while leaving "yoursite.com" in their browser bar. This way it doesn't look quite like cheap forwarding... even though it is.

Anyway, this set-up will run you about $8.00 per year. If you get some traffic, then think about going web-crazy. If not, maybe try some web advertising (which Merchant Circle can help you with for a fee), or try something else entirely.

 

[Buckettruckbabe]

Thanks!

Another freebie you can utilize for promotions are blogs...

Wordpress is great and so is Blogger. Cross promote and enhance your business presence between your website and accounts. I utilizie everything I can get my hands on.

Be sure to take advantage of free classifieds too, especially those that allow backlinks to your website and photos. Take some nice stills of you doing your work, your equipment & staff. (action stills)

We had an email response recently from a guy in Canada, and his "signature" was a pic of him in a tree with his safety harness, gear and holding up his chainsaw like he was waving "hi".

Very cool.

 

[M.D. Vaden]

You could get somone like Hawt Sites to get you up and running for just a few hundred dollars. Based out of Portland.

http://www.hawtsites.com

You don't need to get too fancy, but just a nice presentable site with a couple of pages.

A service like that could have you up and running in almost no time at all.

Its really quite inexpensive.

 

[Lumberjacked]

Last week I got THREE!!! calls the same day from the yellow pages people trying to get me to adv. with them...haha. 5 years ago...zero calls ALL year, think about it, they too know the phone book is becoming worthless that is why they are now the ones calling us.

My website was made by a friend that went to school for web design and photography, $1200 later I have a great base for future changes and growth. www.AGreenerCNY.com In my opinion it is 110% better then any other companies that I am in direct competition with. Check it out I would love some of your feedback.

 

[BuddhaKat]

I do websites and hosting. It's not expensive at app to put up a simple website. Take a look at my firewood site. www.MikeTheFirewoodGuy.com.

 

[ddhlakebound]

Last week I got THREE!!! calls the same day from the yellow pages people trying to get me to adv. with them...haha. 5 years ago...zero calls ALL year, think about it, they too know the phone book is becoming worthless that is why they are now the ones calling us.

My website was made by a friend that went to school for web design and photography, $1200 later I have a great base for future changes and growth. www.AGreenerCNY.com In my opinion it is 110% better then any other companies that I am in direct competition with. Check it out I would love some of your feedback.

My inhouse webbuilder took a look at all the pages of your site and threw out a number that was around 25% of your cost to build a site of that size and style. She hadn't yet seen what you said you paid for it.

It's a nice site, but I don't think it's built for good search status. IMO flash should be used in necessary applications, because it does poorly in search engines in alot of cases. There's nothing I see on your site that makes flash necessary.

Also, I didn't think there were enough pics, Love the homepage pic, but the other two are too dark to see clearly. It would take almost no time to touch those up for greatly improved quality, and I've never been to photog school.

Can you add to/edit your site whenever you want?

Check out the web owners working in trees group...http://www.arboristsite.com/showthread.php?t=124258.....My site has benefited greatly from the info that's being shared there.

 

[Lumberjacked]

Well I asked some other web people what they would have charged me and it was 50% more then my original number. As far as search engines, every phrase or word that a customer in my area would search brings up my site in the top 5 options each time. Also, it's not just what you have in your site but what you have in the backdoor code which is actually what is searched by google/yahoo/etc. As far as the pics, not sure if you know this or not but it is a pain to try and read text that is laid over the top of a regular picture. Therefore I had her darken and smooth the edges for ease of reading. We are in the process of getting a picture page together but I feel the information I provide is far more important then a shiney picture.

 

[ddhlakebound]

Well I asked some other web people what they would have charged me and it was 50% more then my original number. As far as search engines, every phrase or word that a customer in my area would search brings up my site in the top 5 options each time. Also, it's not just what you have in your site but what you have in the backdoor code which is actually what is searched by google/yahoo/etc. As far as the pics, not sure if you know this or not but it is a pain to try and read text that is laid over the top of a regular picture. Therefore I had her darken and smooth the edges for ease of reading. We are in the process of getting a picture page together but I feel the information I provide is far more important then a shiney picture.

It's not difficult to find someone who's willing to charge you more....the trick is to get the same quality or better work for the same or lower price.

As far as your top 5 statement....

I googled skaneateles ny tree service and you were #2 on google maps. Off google maps, on the web search I could not find your homepage through that search, but I only went a few pages deep. I found your listing on city search, but that didn't lead to your homepage either.

It's not too difficult to rank in the top 2 for a town of 2500 people tho. How are you ranking halfway to Syracuse?

You're correct that behind the scenes coding is important, but those bots also crawl all the info on your site, and incorporate that info into their algorythim for how you rank. And they can't read flash, so all they can see of your site is what's behind the scenes. Do you think arboristsite comes up in almost every tree subject you search because of their behind the scenes coding?

Re: pics....I'm refering to the pics on the left edge of the about, philosophy, and especially the contact us page. Has nothing to do with anything that text is written on.

Since you chose to put pics in, and probably the pics themselves, why would you not want your potential customers to see your work as clearly as possible?

I hope you didn't choose flash so people couldn't take pics and stuff from your site, because that's easily gotten around....see...

Yours on the left, on the right is the same pic after a thirty second retouching. But I'm sure you're right....who needs shiney when you can just wonder what you're looking at.....

 

[BuddhaKat]

Well I asked some other web people what they would have charged me and it was 50% more then my original number. As far as search engines, every phrase or word that a customer in my area would search brings up my site in the top 5 options each time. Also, it's not just what you have in your site but what you have in the backdoor code which is actually what is searched by google/yahoo/etc. As far as the pics, not sure if you know this or not but it is a pain to try and read text that is laid over the top of a regular picture. Therefore I had her darken and smooth the edges for ease of reading. We are in the process of getting a picture page together but I feel the information I provide is far more important then a shiney picture.

I think you've got a nice site, but I made two observations. 1. The background image needs to be just a tiny bit lighter. 2. I like the roll over effect, but I think when you click on something in the list, the info should stay persistent. If you accidentally roll off the trigger the user has to 'bother' with getting it back.

Other than that, I like the site. I would have charged you a bit less though if I had done it.

Cheers,

 

[af7850]

As far as your top 5 statement....

I googled skaneateles ny tree service and you were #2 on google maps. Off google maps, on the web search I could not find your homepage through that search, but I only went a few pages deep. I found your listing on city search, but that didn't lead to your homepage either.

Interesting... I ran the exact same search, and he came up #2 for local results, then #1 in search results, with Citysearch result being #2.

View attachment 125788

I have also been told that flash sites don't rank as well. In fact, I ran a quick SEO optimization analysis of this site and, aside from the title tag, returned no readable content. However, regardless of our opinions regarding flash sites, there's no arguing the results.

Since you chose to put pics in, and probably the pics themselves, why would you not want your potential customers to see your work as clearly as possible?

I think using pictures as background is a nice touch when done well. Overall aesthetics of a site is, IMO, one of the more underrated components of great web design.

Yours on the left, on the right is the same pic after a thirty second retouching. But I'm sure you're right....who needs shiney when you can just wonder what you're looking at.....

I think that you are bing a bit overcritical here. In fact, I the original image, while a bit drab, shows well enough in my monitor to be easily visible, while your alteration looks washed out and far more colorless.

View attachment 125789
View attachment 125790

If anything, you can alter the saturation, color depth, hue and contrast to perk up your image and give it a little more "pop".

View attachment 125791

That took me less than a minute with FREE image engineering software, and I'll be the first to admit that I'm no pro-caliber graphic arts guy. I'm sure that a pro could do a much finer job without breaking a sweat.

Overall:

- I agree with BuddhaKat about the rollover effect.
- I like the overall layout of the site.
- I know it's difficult to contrast text laid over bkgd images. While you do it adequately, I think that it could be tweaked if you're concerned about it.
- If you are concerned about visible images, add a photo book.
- I would like to hear your thoughts on other searches that you'd like to rank well for (Syracuse was mentioned)?

I'm no web professor, but I'd grade it a solid B, which on my scale is certainly above average. Nice work!

 

[ddhlakebound]

Interesting... I ran the exact same search, and he came up #2 for local results, then #1 in search results, with Citysearch result being #2.

View attachment 125788

I have also been told that flash sites don't rank as well. In fact, I ran a quick SEO optimization analysis of this site and, aside from the title tag, returned no readable content. However, regardless of our opinions regarding flash sites, there's no arguing the results.

I think using pictures as background is a nice touch when done well. Overall aesthetics of a site is, IMO, one of the more underrated components of great web design.

I think that you are bing a bit overcritical here. In fact, I the original image, while a bit drab, shows well enough in my monitor to be easily visible, while your alteration looks washed out and far more colorless.

View attachment 125789
View attachment 125790

If anything, you can alter the saturation, color depth, hue and contrast to perk up your image and give it a little more "pop".

View attachment 125791

That took me less than a minute with FREE image engineering software, and I'll be the first to admit that I'm no pro-caliber graphic arts guy. I'm sure that a pro could do a much finer job without breaking a sweat.

Overall:

- I agree with BuddhaKat about the rollover effect.
- I like the overall layout of the site.
- I know it's difficult to contrast text laid over bkgd images. While you do it adequately, I think that it could be tweaked if you're concerned about it.
- If you are concerned about visible images, add a photo book.
- I would like to hear your thoughts on other searches that you'd like to rank well for (Syracuse was mentioned)?

I'm no web professor, but I'd grade it a solid B, which on my scale is certainly above average. Nice work!

I re-ran the search today and got your results....I don't think I missed it last night, but it's possible.

At any rate, Skaneateles is a town of 2500 people. I don't think thats enough people to stay busy, and when you begin searching only a few miles away, Lake Lawn Tree Service becomes nearly unfindable.

Your comments on my pic alteration were the one thing I was worried about and didn't want to hear......Looks like my monitor is playing tricks on me....time for a new one. Now I'm worried that some of the pics on my site have the same washed out colorless look.

aside from the title tag, returned no readable content

Thats exactly the problem....A person can't code enough information into a flash site to rank well in a broad area.

Flash is great. It can do things that cant be achieved any other way. But it's a poor choice for a contractor site operating in a fixed area, especially a basically static site.

I said in my first post about the site that it was a good looking, nice site. My (some incorrect) criticisms were meant only to help.

Lumberjacked has still not told us whether he can add/edit content at will, and for free, which is a pretty important aspect to an evolving site. When you combine the limitations flash imposes, and the cost of the site build, and the cost of site changes & maintenance, there are better, more cost effective ways to achieve the goal. But that's only my opinion. I'm not a webmaster either, so disregard my opinion at will.

The important thing is whether Lumberjacked is happy with his site and it's performance. He's the one footing the bill, so what I think doesn't really matter. Apologies if my opinions come off as combative.