Jo Conti's Story
One day, after a long but fruitful conversation my new partner and I came to an important decision about our new business venture. To reach the customers we hoped to reach, we needed a presence on the World Wide Web. We smiled smugly at each other over our cooling mugs of coffee. ‘Right’ I said, ‘that’s what we’ll do and watch the orders flooding in’.
Simple?
Well, as it turned out, not really.
That evening I sat in front of my computer and typed ‘website designers’ into the search box. Literally thousands and thousands of sites were found offering their services. Quite a lot of these services were for things that I could only hazard guess at – SEO, RSS feeds, Templates, HTML, CSS, Tagging? I randomly visited some of the sites, contacted a few and was horrified to find that the quotes I was getting back were way in excess of anything I had imagined and the Ecommerce packages were at least double the price. As a new business we were totally unable to afford even the cheapest quote.
After three weeks of getting unsolicited phone calls from mysteriously named ‘Webmasters’ and having to apologies yet again for being a poor, struggling designer, I decided that enough was enough. I would see what I could do myself – after all, how hard can it be?
In desperation, I started randomly searching my computer programs for inspiration when I cam across‘Publisher’ in the Microsoft Office suite, which offered a website building option. Because I am anything but technically minded, it took me weeks to learn how to input the information, but eventually I got it and actually it became quite an enjoyable task. It was (once I got the hang of it) fairly easy to fill in the information I wanted to appear on each page, plus thankfully there is the option to return to a previously saved version of the current page in case of any huge mistakes. The pages are set up for you into appropriate headings such as ‘About Us’; ‘Products’; ‘Contact Us’ etc. and all you have to do is to upload your required text , images or photographs onto the appropriate page.
My partner was, thankfully, very pleased with the end result as, being even less technically minded than I am she was very pleased with herself for having chosen the predominant color for the pages! To be honest, when I had completed the site I did feel as if I had triumphed over some large, substantial adversity and had come out the other end a more rounded, mature person for it.
But my self satisfaction was to be short lived.
Now was the matter of finding a company to actually ‘host’ the website. Again this involved lots of searching on the internet and lots of enquiry making and lots of companies offering lots and lots of options. I did my research and looked for a company that not only offered good value for money but also met our web hosting needs – which wasn’t actually that much.
The first company I chose was one of the top ranking sites on the internet. I paid my money and was promised immediate hosting activation. I was thrilled. However it wasn’t to be. The ‘tools’ that were supposed to help me activate my hosting were nowhere to be seen; I had tried exhaustive methods but failed to find them and therefore was stuck. Also, because I had registered with this company I was now unable to move my hosting elsewhere for a full 60 days. This was a disaster as we wanted to get our website up and running as soon as possible so as to reap the benefits of a huge customer base!
After three days and most of three nights I was a frazzled wreck and felt that the time had come to give up. Luckily though I had an acquaintance who knows a thing or to about web hosting. Enticed with the offer of a cup of tea he came over and he and my husband, in truly heroic fashion, vowed to sort it between them.
Three hours later a very shame faced pair had to admit defeat and I was given the name and contact number of another man, who, I actually knew and advised to contact him. The same thing happened -he came over but failed to find the tools required to get the website actually onto the web. Crest fallen he offered to look into it in the next couple of days but said that he was totally baffled by the missing tool saga and didn’t hold out much hope.
Thankfully, in the meantime my husband had looked on the web for any web hosting companies that were local to us (Wales) and had come up trumps. A company called ‘Web Host Wales’ were situated in a small village a mere10 miles from where we lived. I sent them a pathetic plea for help and within the hour had a
message back saying that they thought they could do something. They requested my telephone number and called me to arrange for a visit to see if they could sort something out.
Catherine and Matt came over, she a very elegant and expensive looking Texan and he a shy computer expert. They looked through the site and promised to sort it out immediately. Catherine has been programming practically from birth as her father owns a computer software company in the US. She phoned me later and had transferred my web address to their hosting company without the stated penalty time lapse of 60 days for transfer. Having looked at the site and liked it she politely suggested that it needed work. Apparently ‘Publisher’ is not the best way to go as the site tends to ‘jump’ around when viewed on different servers. The best way to do it is to use coding for website designing or failing that there are several other programs that were far superior for the task such as ‘Dreamweaver’.
But time was not on our side. It had now been three months since we had decided to launch a website and we really couldn’t prolong the agony any longer.
Now, to cut a very long and protracted story shorter, it transpires that Catherine and Matt plan to marry this August and I am a fashion designer. In the spirit of skill sharing we came to an agreement. Web Host Wales are now taking over all my web design and hosting needs in exchange for a wedding gown and a wedding party outfit for Catherine. This was such a load off my mind that I was practically doing cartwheels.
But it isn’t plain sailing from here on in.
Apparently it is going to take at least six months for the search engine ‘spiders’ to pick up on our website. It takes months to be recognized on the web, and even then there is no guarantee that we will ever get onto the first couple of pages, which is as far as most people bother to search. This is especially true now that things like Ad words and PayPerClick have reared their ugly heads.
There is now an option on Google, and possibly the other search engines I suppose, to pick the words you require and pay for every time someone types in and then clicks on the words you have chosen. Basically what this means is that the most popular words typed into a search bar are well beyond the reach of the small business man/woman. Only huge conglomerates or certainly larger companies than ours can afford to spend the many thousand s of dollars a day it would cost for words such as ‘sale’ or ‘jewelry’…once again things are getting out of reach of small businesses.
Unfortunately the web is not the golden chalice that it previously was. With more traffic than ever vying for the first two or three displayed pages of search results the only way to get guaranteed traffic to your site is if the customer already knows your website address. For this you will need to go back to traditional advertising methods such as radio, television, magazine or newspaper advertising to get the message across that your company actually exists and has a web presence.
We have now been online since February 2008 and unfortunately it had not made one iota of difference to our business. We have had hardly any visitors to our site and absolutely no sales. This is extremely disappointing of course, however, thankfully the pieces are selling well in the shops and we are now working on the designs for our second range, which will be out soon!
So, basically there is no easy way around starting a business. It involves a lot of hard work, disappointments and frustrations’. If you are one of the lucky ones then your company will succeed, if not then it will fall by the wayside along with the majority of new start-up businesses every year. It’s just a case of keeping your nose to the grindstone, doing the best you can and having the belief that you can come through this ….with a bit of luck!
But then as the saying goes….if it was easy everyone would be doing it!
- Jo
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