website/ecommerce design & templates too

[john@dreamonline]

Hi everyone,

I am a freelance webmanager in the UK. I would like to tell you about a couple of offeres i have available at my new website -

www.dreamonline-webdesign.com

Bespoke Website Designs from £100 including 1 years free Hosting & domain name registration.

If you are looking to setup an online store then Iam currently providing a monthly service which £20 per month. This again includes hosting and domain name registration plus full support from myself to help with any problems or questions you may have.

You can contact me via email, telephone or Live chat via my site.

thanks for looking

John

[fisicx]

Except your site breaks in Firefox and Opera, contains coding errors, is not SE friendly, uses HTML styles instead of CSS and includes tables for structure.

There are no hosting details, privacy policy, terms and conditions, architecture and contingency plans and so on.

Show me some of the sites you have built for others and let me find them on google and you might attract my attention...

[john@dreamonline]

yes I know there is a problem with firefox and I havent tested it with Opera yet but will have a look.

The website is still in its early days so please go easy on me. Privacy policy, terms and conditions etc will all be up soon.

[fisicx]

And that's the problem. You are offering a deal right now with a flawed product. Can I suggest you fix your own site first, use CSS for the styling and make sure it validates before you go into business.

Your best advertising will come from satisfied clients so try to build at least one successful site before you go big time.

I had some good advice form somebody the other day. They said that cheap deals provide cheap products. You cannot build a successful, optimised site for £100. Take out the hosting and registration costs and that means you are paying yourself about £20 per page. A good design with customer consultaion will take 2-3 days. That's £20 per day. You can't house and feed yourself for that.

[trainershack]

take fisicx's comments seriously...he speaks good sense.

[peterjhale]

yes he does

I wonder what he would say about teneric

[john@dreamonline]

what difference is it going to make to my customers if i spend hours basically completely re-making my site to incorporate Cascading Style Sheets? None whatsoever!

An I thought that I posted this topic in the "Buy Sell or Trade" Forum, not the "please nitpick at my website and drive any potenetial customers reading this topic away" Forum!
I replied nicely to your first unnecessary post, but you've continued to pick at things.
If you wanted to point things out about my website then the decent thing to do would have been contact me personally and then I would have cared what you have to say but you just seem to want to make me look bad because you are in the same business.

And why can't I build a successful Optimised 3 page website for £100? for a start I provide my own Hosting to customers and Domain names are hardly expensive now are they.
If you want to charge over the odds for your websites then thats upto you but I dont, ok.

To anyone viewing this topic, if you want to look at my site and make your own mind up as to the quality of my services then please do. This person obviously wants you to go on his/her link and pay over a £1000 for theirs!!!

[TWD-Tony]

Woah - calm down guys!

There are two sides to this and they are both valid... Firstly, if anyone wants to offer "cheap" design then it is up to them, there are plenty of people in this world that DO think that price is everything and there is certainly a market for cheap web design.
On the other hand... Your own website is a portal or "window" to your work, so you should try and make it as compatible with other browsers as you can and keep to current coding trends (css etc) in order to provide a showcase, the average joe in the street probably won't even know what css is - but the average joe MAY be using firefox or opera and visiting the site of a web designer that looks all broken is a sure put off!

So lets not get nasty about this...

[fisicx]

Gosh!

Don't want to upset you John, I'm just trying to offer advice given to me that has actually improved my business. Offer cheap and you will get everybody banging your door expecting personal service night and day. Put a more realistic price on your services and all of a sudden you get a better choice of customer. Do you really want the customer who spends two weeks deciding on which shade of blue to use before changing their mind and opting for the pink at 10pm on a sunday evening?

As to the CSS issue - if you don't want to spend your life building hacks making a site work in all browsers then you need to build to web-standards. And that means using CSS. There is also the big advantage that an external style sheet will make for a compact site (faster downloads), be more accessible to the robots and be so much easier to maintain in the future. It will also mean that you can print out a page with losing the righthand column (which always happens if you use a fixed width tables). There are other long term issues regarding the depreciation of some HTML styling tags but that's pretty much secondary.

And I certainly don't want to take away your business - I don't do e-commerce sites in any case. What I do do is build sites that rank well with the search engines. And all I'm trying to do is offer a little advice that I wish somebody had given me 10 years ago when I started out.

Sorry, one last thought. Your potential customers are unlikely to be reading this forum. Most members already have a web presence and there is only a tiny SEO advantage in posting your URL. And in any case, if I were a potential customer using firefox (15% and rising), do you think I'd still be a potential customer

[john@dreamonline]

Fair enough then i apologise for going on!

That was the impression I was getting from your responses and it got to me quite abit.

I will take your advise on board fisicx.