Web Site

[edward]

I have Webs.com as a free website and as of March 2021 it will no longer exist as they will be Vista Print and  there will be a charge so now I have to look for another good free website, it's a shame as I still have plenty of Business cards left and no shows until sometime next year. Some times I wonder if it's worth a website as I have never sold anything off of it.

[kmmcrafts]

Websites are very hard to get sales from without a ton of time promoting or a large amount of money for paid ads etc...

The way I started was on sites like etsy, eBay, Amazon etc etc... and from there any orders get a business card with coupon codes etc. to my website... after nearly 6 years of doing this... my site is really gaining traffic and getting a decent amount of sales.. 

I believe Wix has free site builder up to so many GB of page transfers or something.. Not sure how it works these days.. It's been years since I've messed with free... free means a ton of work and dedication to gain absolutely 0 sales.. might be worth it in the long run of about 10+ years of a lot of work.. I've been there done that on many of the "Free" sites... and they ALWAYS change and either charge you a fee of take the site down or change ownership and then cater to the ones that Pay for the site.. In my opinion... nothing is free... you either pay and get results now.. or pay with a lot of hours of your time etc... For me... I'd rather be in my shop making more things than playing around with free sites hoping to hit it big.. 

A free website is like building a brick and mortar store out in the middle of a forest and then put up no signs to even show what the building is... and no advertising.. Think about the big companies starting up a new business.. They typically send out flyers and big banners saying grand opening sale this and that.. 

Most of the paid site spend a very small portion to push your site to google searches.. and it's still tough to get you enough traffic.. 

[BadBob]

You can get a paid web site for as little as $4 a month plus the cost of your domain name. I used Blue Host for many years and only left them because my needs changed. Blue Host support was excellent. Google has free web hosting, although I have not used it.

[ben2008]

I designed my own website using Microsoft FrontPage. I was the webmaster and did all the updates, maintenence myself.  I used a local cedit card processing co here in MI until PayPal came along. I still have a PayPal business account today. I only paid hosting fees. I had the site for 12 years. And honestly it took about 6 years to get going. I had some unique products for a while and did pretty good. I sold mostly licensed sports apparel and bikinis. Yes, bikinis. I sold Corona bikinis and they went really well for a few years until the big boys caught on. Along came Walmart and others and they were selling the same items for what I was paying for them. They ran me out of business. I shut it down in 2010.

[kmmcrafts]

7 hours ago, ben2008 said:

I designed my own website using Microsoft FrontPage. I was the webmaster and did all the updates, maintenence myself.  I used a local cedit card processing co here in MI until PayPal came along. I still have a PayPal business account today. I only paid hosting fees. I had the site for 12 years. And honestly it took about 6 years to get going. I had some unique products for a while and did pretty good. I sold mostly licensed sports apparel and bikinis. Yes, bikinis. I sold Corona bikinis and they went really well for a few years until the big boys caught on. Along came Walmart and others and they were selling the same items for what I was paying for them. They ran me out of business. I shut it down in 2010.

Same here.. and now days... everyone wants a piece of the internet sales pie.. everybody and their brother and sister is trying to make a business online... A LOT more competition now than there was 25 years ago when I started a website selling tractor parts.. Now you can go to eBay and other places and get those same parts for less than I paid for them.. Took me a while to figure out how they was doing it.. but I caught on and could start it back up.. But at the moment I am enjoying what I do.. when I get tired of making my crafts and want something different... I'll move on.. at least I'm not stuck on the same assembly line day in day out 8 days a week at some factory.. or working in the autobody collision repair working with all the dangerous paint chemicals etc..  

$30 + or - a month may seem like a lot of money but when you have tech issues with your website and you cant get sales because the site is down.. you could loose a lot of money.. and time spent getting the site up is time away from making product.. when the venues go down they have a tech team and typically restoring it in a short amount of time.. Another reason I sell on several sites.. if a site goes down.. I'm still getting sales on one or more of the other sites.. 

[ben2008]

2 hours ago, kmmcrafts said:

Same here.. and now days... everyone wants a piece of the internet sales pie.. everybody and their brother and sister is trying to make a business online... A LOT more competition now than there was 25 years ago when I started a website selling tractor parts.. Now you can go to eBay and other places and get those same parts for less than I paid for them.. Took me a while to figure out how they was doing it.. but I caught on and could start it back up.. But at the moment I am enjoying what I do.. when I get tired of making my crafts and want something different... I'll move on.. at least I'm not stuck on the same assembly line day in day out 8 days a week at some factory.. or working in the autobody collision repair working with all the dangerous paint chemicals etc..  

$30 + or - a month may seem like a lot of money but when you have tech issues with your website and you cant get sales because the site is down.. you could loose a lot of money.. and time spent getting the site up is time away from making product.. when the venues go down they have a tech team and typically restoring it in a short amount of time.. Another reason I sell on several sites.. if a site goes down.. I'm still getting sales on one or more of the other sites.. 

Yep, 25/30  years ago. Not that long ago considering how old the earth is. Not many people knew of Amazon or Jeff Bezos back then. Now look where he is at. The richest person on the planet because of a vision. The competition got a bit much for me at that time.

I was 70 then and didn't want to fight for a tiny slice of the pie anymore. It's been almost 11 years and I'll soon be 81 and doing what I like in my basement workshop. It's just getting a little harder to navigate those darn stairs. But I'm still plugging along and I'll keep doing what I'm doing until I can't.

Edited November 16, 2020 by ben2008