SOHO Solutions

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Small Business Web Site Design

  I am going to give you the secret to getting your website designed, hosted and published in record time and at the lowest cost you ever thought possible. Just think about this for a minute. We have it easy these days. Yes, we have many tools available to aide in Small Business Web Site Design. Many of the tools are free or very minimal in cost. Yet many small business owners do not have a website. I often ask myself why more small business owners do not take advantage of all the free technology and low cost services available. How many times have you seen business cards with e-mail addresses like something@yahoo.com or something@hotmail.com. Why do they use these non-branded e-mail addresses to promote their brand or service? Because it is free. Perhaps they did not know that they can get a domain name from godaddy.com for less than 12.95 per year. In some cases you can even get a domain name from Godaddy for as little as .89 cents per month. Listen up. Free e-mail comes with these accounts in many cases. For goodness sake if you do not want to use  Godaddy’s e-mail you can easily point your domain to Gmail.com and use a free Gmail account with your branded domain name. The instructions are on the Gmail.com site. I apologize for my rant. I just feel that with a little research everyone could have a branded website and free e-mail for their small business. So, if you don’t know where to begin, listen up and read on because I am going to do my best to point you in the right direction and give you a boost. For pure function there are very few steps to getting your web site up.

1. Get a domain name. There are many places that sell domain names. These places are called domain name registrars. Some are more expensive but have been around for a long time. They offer many services that you might not need. Domain name registrars like networksolutions.com are a little higher priced and cater more towards the big boys.
My favorite domain name registrar for buying domain names intended for small business web site design is Godaddy.com.

 Godaddy has low priced domain names and all the basics you need including free and low cost hosting packages for your domain name. Godaddy has a great control panel that is simple enough for the non technical user to use. Check it out. Domain Sale! $6.89 .com at GoDaddy

2. Get a hosting company. I would not spend more than 5.00 to 7.00 dollars per month. There are several companies that have good hosting packages that are great for small business web site design and hosting. Here is a discount link to Godaddy where I host this blog. I use the economy hosting plan and I have had no problems. Click here to Learn about 20% off Hosting at GoDaddy.com – World’s largest Web host!

  Another great hosting provider that I really like is Bluehost.com. The prices are very reasonable and I am currently hosting one other website at BlueHost.com. If you plan to host more than one web site then Blue Host is probably for you. They have a great deal on unlimited hosting packages. Check it out. CLICK HERE TO LEARN ABOUT BLUEHOST.COM

3. Decide if you want to build a website from scratch or do what many are doing and use the free WordPress from Wordpress.org. Both Godaddy and blue host offer a free installs that do everything for you except enter the content that you want to publish. If you are not familiar with WordPress it is a complete blog and content management system. There are over 1500 free themes to choose from. You can publish a single page or pages or a series of articles like I do (or both). It took about 30 seconds for my WordPress to install on BlueHost and a few minutes on Godaddy.
Yes, I have web sites hosted at both Godaddy and BlueHost. I was searching for a good low cost hosting company and I am currently using them both. Soho-411.com is currently hosted on Godaddy. Also remember that you can host your web site anywhere you want. I have other domain names that I purchased from Godaddy but host elsewhere. Remember that control panel that Godaddy has that I told you about? Well it allows you to point your web address to any hosting comany you choose.

CLICK HERE TO SIGNUP FOR WORDPRESS HOSTING AT BLUEHOST.COM

4. Not Required but Highly Recommended…. If you choose to go the next step and design your sight for the best customer experience you might want to read this e-book.  There is a free sample chapter you can download to help you get an idea what this e-book is all about.  Click Here to download the free Chapter!

Good Luck and please don’t forget to update us with you experiences with different hosting companies.

OK I am an old fashioned guy. I am just learning about Social Media and Blogging. To me it is amazing what mediums are available for advertising. So there are a lot of Baby Boomers out there but if you want to sell products to a sustainable market then you are going to need to know how to market to the new Generation. Gen “X” or what ever the popular term is.
We know we need a web site to do this but what about facebook and twitter etc?

Well since I am doing the research myself I might as well share what I am learning in the process. Here is a link to an interesting blog post I found. I do suggest that you read the article. The title of the article is “Still Trying to Figure out if Twitter is Important to Your Business”  The author is apparently on the fence about this. However, it appears to me that the real benefit to the SOHO business person is what Google is doing to archive all this Twitter Tweet. ha-ha . Google apparently can show you the top visited web pages that contained information on a particular twitter tweet thingy. Since most of these web pages are blogs that allow you to post it would appear an ideal place to speak up and put your information in front of a bigger audience.

Please return to this page often as I will continue to put links here when I find useful information.

It is very easy to use Google Ad Words to drive customers to your site. As a matter of fact many so called SEO and pay-per-click companys simply charge their customers for setting them up on Google’s Ad Words.

Why not do a little research and cut out the middle man. The results may suprise you!
Here is a collection of Videos from YouTube that teach you about Ad Words.

Getting Started

Google’s Local Business Center is a great tool for getting your Business correctly listed in Google Maps.More and more people are searching the web for businesses than anywhere else, so it’s important to make sure your business is listed correctly in both Google.com and Google Maps.

How it works:

By submitting and verifying your information to google.com/lbc, Google will trust this information as a priority over any other information they find about your business over the internet. You are able to add things such as: description of your business, a photo, reviews, hours and parking costs. Google’s Local Business Center also has other great feature that will help you leverage your business on the web. The Dashboard helps you see how Google users interact with your listing in Google Maps and Google Search. There is also a Coupon feature which allows you to provide special discounts and deals to potential customers who come across your listing in Google Maps. Finally, you will also be able to add both pictures and videos about your business

All information provided by google.com/lbc

OK So how do you get a web site up fast?
Well if you want to get a website up fast and with very little cost and you have time to do it yourself there is “WordPress”.

WordPress is a free blog software.
You can download it at http://wordpress.com .
Wordpress is a very powerful easy to implement blog/website builder.
To make things even easier you can get cheap hosting at
Godaddy.com that comes with a free word press installation.
Basically, all you have to do is click and give a few instructions and the software is installed on the web server for you.

There are many Themes available for WordPress for free that make for a very flexible web package.
If you can type you can put up a web site with little or no HTML coding.
As a matter of fact this site is hosted on Godaddy and uses the wordpress install there.

There are a few things that you have to do like purchase a domain name and a hosting package but Godaddy makes it easy
and offers a low cost blog package. I spent a little extra money but I have a friend that purchased a domain name at Godaddy for 9.99
for 1 year and purchased the word press blog hosting package for 4.99/mo.
Of course you get deals for buying for a year or more.
My friend got her WordPress site up in a few hours and she has no IT or web programming experience.
The Godaddy Support is also helpful.



If you are interested in some good development books try the following Books.