Web Site Help

[mollyp]

i need help / advice to improve my website to get more business please pm me if you can help

Edited September 13, 2010 by mollyp

[sulasno]

what kind of help and advice do you need ?

ps are we allowed to post urls here ?

[ManInSurat]

Hi Molly.

You're being really vague if you're looking for help.

You need to articulate better what exactly the problem is.

When you say you need to improve your website, do you mean you need to actually make the layout and content better. Do you need to make it more user-friendly?

A lot of websites try and win the Turner prize instead of just focussing on making it nice and easy for people to use. A lot of Thai websites fall foul of this.

If you're talking about traffic. Well there is no easy fix for that. There's no easy fix without some form of investment on your part either. Be it SEO/PPC offline advertising of your URL etc.

You have to be more clear about what the problem is, then more people will be able to help you and will send you a PM.

To me you sound like you're trying to just get quick and fast business advice for free. There is no quick fix!

Edited September 13, 2010 by ManInSurat

[A_Traveller]

In fairness to the OP, I'm assuming this is the site which was posted and discussed yesterday, before the threads [yes multiple] were removed presumably owing to the inclusion of the url.

In brief, the site provide out of the [up North] UK is appalling, and has so much wrong with it it difficult to imagine a company offering this level of service in 1995 yet alone 2010.

However, the other latent issue is content itself. Without decent well formed data the site will still fail. Some suggested Joomla or their own services yesterday. In my view you would be better taking time to learn a little about the web first so that you could ask the right questions of any supplier, and looking for a blog style approach where you can build up content. If it is a property site and you don't have any to sell, this does make things tricky, but at least you could write up the inevitable 'buying property in Thailand' section.

Regards

[ManInSurat]

Can this thread be closed and/or removed then please?

If 90% of it is missing, I see no point in it being here.

[siamect]

We have all been there and made our first web-pages and I don't think any of us has started off any better than this.

There is absolutely nothing wrong about asking for a quick and fast business advice for free. All businesses are depending on that to some extent...

So what do we have? We have a 3 page website with an ok top. A contact form and an "about us" link.

I think this is not that bad for a beginning, a website does not have to be complex or big to be enjoyable. I think with the right font, correct some spellings and a little background and few more photos of correct size, and some interesting text, this page can be enjoyable.

The road to that point is very short. It doesn't take much effort. With a little luck you can have and ok website by tomorrow...

So what about the expansion? Expansion on this host www.vistaprint.co.uk is maybe not impossible, but it is limited to what they offer with the website builder that they provide.

Another, more severe problem is that the domain name seems to be owned by Vistaprint. This will be a problem when you want to move the website to a host with better possibilities.

It can take long time (years) before they release the domain. It's like a trap and it is very common. Check what their policies are so you know.

The key to being free from these traps is to divide the effort on three different companies.

1. I would go to a different registrar (http://www.verio.com or http://domainbank.com but there are tons to choose from ) and register a new domain, only a domain, no hosting, just the domain.

2. Then you can choose a webhotel somewhere else or host it yourself at home.

3. You also need a DNS provider... afraid.org works well for me, but there are others...

If these three are separate companies, it is difficult for any of them to trap you...

Then I would go for a framework. I think Mike in Phuket already wrote about that. Joomla is ok Drupal is very good but a little learning curve and there are tons of others.

The best frame works are free software... look for GNU/GPL license. If not GPL, ditch it!

Avoid quick installers provided by the webhosts... Although it is an easy start it makes it more difficult to move everything to a new webhost in case you want to switch.

Frameworks saves a lot of time and you can focus on the content and not on the coding.

Ok maybe this is too much for you right now, but you need to start somewhere and to cleanup the existing page is the first priority. It should not be difficult to do. Play around with it... and don't listen to the negative ones...

Martin

Edited September 13, 2010 by siamect