[mystery]

Hello all, total newbie here......

I have a little domestic cleaning business already established, I don't have a website & have hardly advertised in the past. Just wondering how much business a website might generate (a low budget one  ) or if I should possibly concerntrate on other types of advertising for the time being??

Any suggestions very welcome, and any recommendations of web designers etc would also be of help.

[BDCS]

A website will cost about £5 a month. We probably get 30-40% of our work through our webite which the missus does herself.

[mystery]

Thanks for your reply BDCS, when you put it like that, it does seem like a no-brainer 

What I was thinking more about, was the initial outlay, of a web designer. Did it cost you much to start with??

 I was considering the cost of designer, plus hosting, domain, cost of driving traffic, adwords etc (not sure if this costs or not?!?) etc etc, whether it would be worth it in the near future.

 I want to expand from the two of us at the moment, up to 3 in January, then possibly a 4th at some point next year, so obviously I need to get the phone ringing with enquiries to facilitate that.

Do you mind me asking where the other 60-70% of your business comes from if not your website?

[sherco]

Had my web site around a month now, cost £500 already got £3,000 worth of work from it. 

[BDCS]

I just bought her a new web package - cost me £100 and its kept her quiet for ages. We've got the cleaning site,drains sites and a bouncy castle site. We got the url's from Uk reg who also host the sites.

[HomeMaid]

YOu can use Homestead to start with. Its easy to use and has everything "under the hood" taken care of  ...it costs $10 a month!

You MUST take some time to understand SEO issues as the package "out-of-the-box" isnt set up right. In truth you need to know about SEO with any package or website.

It takes time to get listed in google organically so you will need to embrace PPC advertising too.

All the techy stuff to make a website generate leads and revenue can be daunting, it took me 4 months of work, evenings and weekends to get into top 5 google for local searches....but now it pays me back every week 

my website www.expert-home-cleaning.com is built on a template from Homestead. It will have designers cringing, maybe even laughing....but client feedback has been incredible!

It looks dated now, even a bit noddy - however, here's the rub; it generates all our leads, yes ALL - except of course the referrals.....

I can measure the success in 100's of quote enquiries (not visitors) and £'000's of revenue this last year.....

I am currently building a new site, with Concrete5 CMS technology which is much easier to use than Joomla or Drupal aplications, check it out;
www.uk-cleaning-services.com <- its still a WIP tho!

This technology is awesome, but does need some tech knowledge to set up your hosting initially although you host with the team that built the package.

[mystery]

BDCS, have you built your sites yourself?? Didn't understand the £100 thing?!

Homemaid, I could probably build a site using software myself, but I know I would struggle with google adwords etc, so I'm going to have to get some help, there's no way I have 4 months to spend on it.

Sherco, did your £500 include listings on search engines or not? £500 doesnt seem too bad, I will only want something fairly basic.

[BDCS]

I bought her software to build the sites, the story goes she had an online shop and had a site built by a local firm called oasthouse media which was a pile of old pants, she read SEO for idiots and found what was wrong but he still  had control of the site and hosting. That business ended and we never wanted to be inb that position again so she does everything herself and have full control ie if we put the prices up we can, easily, without having to pay.
Re adwords - we don't bother as its a false way to be at the top of the listings but you may see different. SEO is hit and miss but worth learning. Try googleing "drain jetting" and our site will be top if not close but a customer will never put this term in, view the source of your most prominant competitor to see the text behind their site and snide the keywords, build some links and you'll be close

[mystery]

Thanks BDCS, can see why you would want to take care of your own websites now....

As for SEO (which I don't yet understand, I'm gonna have to google it!!  ) against adwords, hopefully a designer would sort this for me?

I found this through google http://netsimage.com/nets/index.php they look quite professional (& cheap  ) so I think I'm going to give them a try & see how much it will cost for them to get me listed etc etc

[BDCS]

Search engine optimisation - making the site prominate for your chosen key words ie domestic cleaning dover - what you do and where you are. Choose a name that includes the same - don't have to be your company name, you can have a couple that both point to the same site or link between the two. Anyway I don't know much about websites ( missus does ) I just do the cleaning

[Daria Taylor]

our website is our main business generator, and if i we didnt have it i dont know what we would do. Now thinking about it i could'n imagine our business without one.

Dash T

[mystery]

Having searched SEO, I feel completely dim for not knowing what it meant  : But I am a novice!

I'm sold on the idea now. So I've had a look on google for someone & it seems getting someone to do a template site for now would be the cheapest thing, personally I would have thought that should be good enough for now, what do you guys think?

I'm quite excited about having a website now strangely 

[Nathanael Jones]

Even a template based site once properly optimised can bring in a lot of work. Go for it!

[cleaner-exteriors]

try 1&1 cheap, easy to use with lots of options

[JandS]

Vista Print is good and easy.
Don't pay £500 for someone to do it it's quite easy,
especially with Vista Print, to do on your own.
Get your keywords sorted as well with it.
There are 3 packages and I went for the middle option
at I think £8 per month.
For that you get 5 pages, which is ample, and a job related
e mail address.
You can track your site as to how many people have looked,
what words they used to find the site, where they are looking
at your site etc. You can add pictures as well.
Oh and I think you get a months free trial.

e mail if you need more info   jmdtcs07@sky.com

John

[JandS]

I did it myself last year and I'm number one in 3 areas round here and in top 8 in about 8 others.
It's so easy now even SEO.
I just read up on it all on the internet.
And there's not as much to it as they have you believe.
Give me £250 and and I'll knock you one up!!!

John

[sherco]

I did it myself last year and I'm number one in 3 areas round here and in top 8 in about 8 others.
It's so easy now even SEO.
I just read up on it all on the internet.
And there's not as much to it as they have you believe.
Give me £250 and and I'll knock you one up!!!

John

Lets see your site then 

[mystery]

Thanks JandS, I will take a look at Vistaprint...thanks for that.....

Have found a couple of places quite a lot cheaper that will build me a template site, very basic, but probably all I need to start with. I don't think it's really worth my time, considering how cheaply it could be done for, but will take a look anyway 

[mark bowditch]

Hi all
this is copied and pasted from my old post
  I have never had any website training whatsoever
Done my WebPages in Dreamweaver as for optimisation SEO  just a bit of reading it is  quite simple to do most important thing page title reflects what the page is about and not your company name unless you are Argos or comet.
Use H1 tag is heading tag which is Text  in your page for important parts which are key words H6 which is your closing tag.
Also in your page name by which I mean it in a browser after www.your site /carpet cleaning for example.
Also when doing your pages give your picture a name not JPEG 34 and its key words again.

And use the alternate text this describes your picture for people who are blind and have pictures turned off and using  text reader will describe the picture Google cannot see pictures but can read the text more keywords.
Just look at any website right click the picture click on properties you will see what I mean it would normally say missing if you do all this and more and you are the person has the most interest in getting your pages up and you will get to page 1


My advice joined this web development Forum.

http://www.vodahost.com/vodatalk/

And do some reading and asked questions

They have free software but please note this will only work with their hosting package and like a lot of other free software

If you do it in any other normal software they will still hosted.
They also have a fairly good video tutorials section.

good video tutorials section link
http://www.vodahost.com/tut_bluevoda.htm

Sorry to go on a bit and hope it helps someone,
All the best
Mark

[Adam P]

it's funny how unapprecaited us web designers/developers are. as good at the results are that people on here are getting from self made websites or cheap templates, there is a huge gap to do even better by having a professional website, so why not do it? some peopel like myself offer guarantees so you may as well try and if you don't like what you are given then nothing lost 

get someone to make you one and pay decent money for it. it's silly as you'll spend weeks trying to figure out how to the smallest thing and end up with a rubbish site. more and more companies have websites and you need a reason to stand out. you simply wont be able to do a website as good as your competition.

luckily for some areas, e.g. driveway cleaning, there are few companies that have websites and as a result, websites not as good can survive, but it'll only be a matter of time before they will be beaten.

domestic cleaning is highly competitive and you need a reason to set yourself above the competition. you'll HAVE to pay for advertising to be found, and you'll be throwing money down the drain if your website isn't as good as it could be. i hear members on here mention how such and such doesn't work any more, e.g yell, but imo this is because there is better competition.

edit: and to anyone saying seo is simple, then they are massively mistaken. why would companies charge lots of money for this service if it can be done yourself? take advantage of this lack of apprecation and get a professional