Web Site For A Business

[Iolare]

My wife’s sister has a successful business in Phuket selling plumbing pipe and fittings. She does not have a web site, and I think she would benefit from having something online. Is it better to hire a local web hosting business to create and maintain the site, or can one do just as well with a large company like Yahoo? My wife, her sister, and I are all novices at this, so we would appreciate any advice or recommendations.

[LivinLOS]

Dont go local for hosting.. Bandwidth on a Thai host would be poor..

Basically comes down to if your going DiY or contractng someone to do it all for you..

[dsys]

What and who is the website for? This is the first question you should ask yourself. The second is what additional customers would this bring to the business? Would you be targeting Farang or Thai? What language would the site be in? Would you offer online sales or just information about the business? Then ask yourself how will you promote the site?

Before jumping feet first into a website sit down with you sister in law and reason out the extra ongoing expense of a website. Factor in promotion as well as design and hosting. You might be surprised how expensive it is to run a sucessful site. You really need a business plan/case prepepared first and foremost.

Once you are ready with your plan, it will become obvious that you will not be able to do it all yourself (if you want to do it properly). Yahoo stores are a good way to start but you may be limited to English(not sure they may have thai). Using a local company is like employing builders, you need to get good recomendations. If you are all novices then tread carefully as its easy to get ripped off, you do not need all the bells and whistles that they will try to sell you.

One piece of advice is to make sure you own the domain name or register it yourself.

I guess that's all really general info but its hard to post more specific advice without knowing exactly what you want to do with the site.

[bkkmick]

All that is fair enough, but, every business should have an online presence. My wife's little spa shop has a website and get lots of business from it. Even Christian Dior (sp?) found her online and they're doing some promotion together. Get it done and get it up there. It doesn't cost much.

Edited September 26, 2007 by bkkmick

[Iolare]

Thank you for the good advice and comments to far. What prompted this is that i think if you’re doing business you need to be online, since the web seems to function as the new “Yellow Pages.” I was surprised that many people that I’ve met in the construction business here in Phuket didn’t even know of her company even though she may well be the largest wholesaler on the island. She also has a retail store.

I thought she was missing a large share of the potential market for her products by doing no advertising at all, not even a simple website. I think the site would be to attract new customers particularly from the English speaking segment of the market. But, I think it should be in both Thai and English. I'm hoping just being online will create some new business just like it did for "bkkmick's" wife's shop.

I don’t think it would need to show her complete inventory, nor would it need to be set up for online sales. It would be more to announce that she is there for business and has been in business successfully for over 15 years. This proposed venture in an online website won’t make or break her business, but I’m hopeful that the online presence would result in a measurable increase in sales.

So, I have no idea how one promotes a web site, or how customers are driven to it, other than that one hopes a Google search would show it. I have no experience in designing a web site, or selecting a host. That is the reason I made ths posting. I’m hoping someone has had a good experience with someone creating a site for them, and is willing to refer them here.

As for the cost, one poster said they can be expensive, and one said that they are cheap. Can anyone put some numbers to that?

[Tywais]

As for the cost, one poster said they can be expensive, and one said that they are cheap. Can anyone put some numbers to that?

I have a commercial site that I designed and developed myself, its' focus is scientific software and I use a US based web hosting site due to the International aspect of it. The package I have costs $7.95 per month and includes free domain registration. It is one of the top rated web hosting companies and as you can see the price is not that high. There are others I've seen for $2.95 $3.95 per month but have no experience with them.

As for promoting, use Google and search for "SEO", search engine optimization - though the results can be overwhelming.

[dsys]

Sounds like you only want a basic 4 or 5 page information website. You won't need any scripting technologies just a plain basic hosting package. Here is one that has free software that alows you to publish your own site, if you can use word you can use this.

http://www.webfusion.co.uk/webhosting/fusi...indows-asp-net/ (I am not affilated with this site just a happy customer)

Now using a package like that is the cheapest way to go.

If you go to a local custom designer you probably will not get much better as what you need is very basic. Typically for this kind of site I would charge a couple of hundred pounds but I only work in the UK market no experience of Thai pricing.

As for advertising, if you put your site up there it still needs to be found. I did a search for "phuket building supplies" in google uk and found 603,000 results. So it may take a bit of work to gt onto the first page. As mentioned in another post do a search for SEO or SEM. Again a ball park figure to get you some keyword research, link building and page optimisation would be in the order of £500. With an ongoing link building campaign of around £250 a month.

Personnaly if it were me I would do some traditional advertising first, ie newspapers. Perhaps get some T-shirts done and hand them out around the building sites. Or the usual mouse mats, mugs etc.

[Oleg_Rus]

Get a hosting (even free, but now they are about 6$ decent one per month)

buy template (from owner, shop, Pantip plaza, dowload from crack sites)

fill it with your biz info

All done in ONE day.

Wait for ppl from Dior to contact you :-)

[dogit]

every time I read these' how to build a web site' posts I see lots of good advice as I do above the absolute important part is SEO , getting your page seen is everything you can have the best site in the world if no one see's it what is the point? even if you build it yourself or employ a company you need someone to get it noticed I used V9 in Bangkok (google to find them) to get me listed with whoever you need to get listed with and my visitors and customers mushroomed

Edited September 26, 2007 by dogit

[Tywais]

To add to dogit's post. If you get the right provider they will have a package with it with automated submissions of your domain to several search engine sites and do it periodically. Of course you should still 'tune' your search engine measures, but this gets you a quick start.

[Iolare]

Thanks everyone for the suggestions. I put together a simple web site using yahoo and their basic template. As I got into it, I would have liked to have had a few more options for photo locations and type size, and that sort of thing. Despite being a total novice, it was easy to use and cheap, and now we’re on the web.

Part of the package included submission to the google as well as yahoo search engines, which they said could take up to 2 weeks. At the start, we’ll just leave it at that. In the future maybe we’ll look at some promotion strategies. By the way, I just did a google search, and didn’t find the new web site, but this thread on Thai Visa was right near the top!

Here’s the site: www.modernpvc.com. If you have any additional pointers, I’d appreciate that. If anyone else has hesitated to get a web site for their business, just do it. If I can manage it, you can too.