Hi out there in web land. I have a small business and I decided I needed a web site to promote it. I did not know where to go so I looked at advertising and went with ipower which had a good price for a year of hosting service and the domain name was included.

After reading some posts I am not sure that that was a good decision, although my site is up and I have always been able to log on to it. Maybe it works because it is simple.

I built my site using vdeck which went ok, but now I am lost. I want to add other pieces to the site but I am a novice. I need better explinations for stuff I dont get. Its tough getting old.

I would like to add links, a guest book, and possibly on line ordering with credit cards. I tried to add the guest book but I did not seem successful.

I will welcome any help and ideas. Thanks.

Greg it sounds like less of a hosting issue than just a lack of experience. It's hard to give you a specific reason why the guestbook failed since I don't know which one or what was required to install it. It could be that the guestbook was written in a language that your server doesn't support, but I'm guessing it's more the lack of experience.

Could you post a link to the site in question? That might help a little. Do you know whether your site is hosted on a Linux server or a Windows server? Could you describe the procedure for installing the guestbook?

The more information you can fill in the better someone here will be able to help.

I think we may be able to walk you through the guestbook install or at least point you in the right direction. You may want to consider hiring someone to add something for online ordering, since it's a bit more critical to your business.

It's both, actually. I've dealt with iPower(Web) on behalf of my girlfriend's father and they're awful from the support standpoint. Stupid idiots put an .htaccess file on claiming her dad didn't pay when he paid for a year in advance 3 months prior.

Greg: the answer to your question will be the answer you probably don't want to hear because it's not the easy way out, but it's the one that will help you the most in the long run. The answer is twofold:

1) Find another host that will offer the types of services you're after (cPanel, etc.) with the scripts you want (except for the payment processing...you're probably not going to find that with any host, and I will explain later). This will take some research on your part.

2) Either learn to edit code/scripts yourself (which takes a while) so that you can deconstruct and edit the scripts your host provides in part 1) or hire a developer to do so. This is especially true with the e-commerce portion of your site, as what few payment processors have code that a novice webmaster can easily insert (e.g. PayPal) often lead to confusion because of the change in site look and feel, and as such abandonment at the payment processing stage.

It sounds to me on a surface glance that you're trying to get something up as quickly as possible in terms of your site. This isn't always a bad idea, but in the long run it's always best to get things on your site that suit YOUR business and are customized to YOUR customer needs. Standard scripts just don't do that...they have a tendency to be "one size fits all, but no one in particular" in terms of use.

In other words, you have a bigger problem, which is that you seem to want to use the Internet to increase your business without a plan, direction, or anything suited to your business.

Thank you for the comments. I am a novice trying to learn.

My site is gregswoodshop.com

The business I have is a one man deal, me! This will be my retirement extra income. Being a one man shop, and working a full time job for another 2 years does not leave much extra time.

I want to introduce my work to interested people, and the net seemed like the best solution. With the site as it is, I can send interested people there to look at the work. I thought a guest book would give me names of interested people.

I am not sure if online purchasing from my site would be good for a site like mine.


Any suggestions will be welcome. Thanks, Greg.

Hi Greg

Guest books are unfortunately open to abuse and will probably get lots of people posting all sorts of rubbish on there. I would suggest simply making it easy for people to contact you, either by email, telephone or by mail - all of which you do on your contact page.

Using the site as a showcase is an excellent idea, it not only serves as somewhere to direct clients to but also brings in potential customers as well. Adding ecommerce would also work I'm sure since your products look great. I suggest that you do some research with online shopping, and possibly hiring a good web designer because it is quite a minefield for a newbie.

Greg,

I agree that guestbooks aren't worth the effort in most cases. A secure contact form is almost a must for what you want to do..

Nice looking product on your site. Your images may be a bit on the large size for some users. When you start pushing 174K pictures and they aren't porn a lot of people won't care for the delay.

Merry Christmas

Thanks for your input guys. I will be back with more questions after Christmas.

Have a great holliday and God Bless. Greg.

Greg I'm going to agree with the above. I don't think you need a guest book either. Most people probably won't fill them out anyway. I think all you'd really need is the contact information, whether it's email a phone number or preferably both.

I agree with colbyt about the size of the pictures. They're nice, but they do take some time to load. When you're ready I'm sure we can walk you through how to make them smaller and load faster.

I can see advantages to letting people order online, but it's not something you need to do right away. Maybe starting with having people email or call will work at first and if there is demand or you just want to see if it increases sales you can install a shopping cart or some kind of billing system.

Have great holiday yourself and definitely come back with more questions. We're happy to help.

Thanks for your input guys. I have not been able to get back here until today. My family got the flu, including me and I got behind on everything.

I took your advice and reduced the size of the photos on my site. I just shrunk the physical size, I am not sure about the file size. I know there is a way to click on a smaller pic and the system will open up a window with a larger view. I do not know how to set that up.

I have to wear reading glasses so I made the pics large so the baby boomers like me could see the items without theirs.

Should each page in my site have different meta tags, or should the back pages need them at all?

Vdeck has an auto submitter which i used. Only about 1/3 of the sites went active when I submitted. Is there a way to get my site up on the other search engines like google and yahoo?

I look forward to your reply. Thanks.

Greg depending on what image editing software you use you should be able to reduce the file size while keeping the images the same physical size. I use PhotoShop and there's a save for the web feature with some settings to help reduce the size of the file. What program do you use to create and edit images?

The smaller images that open into larger ones are called thumbnails. The best way to do that is to create 2 separate images. One for the thumbnail and one for the full size image. Then the thumbnail would have a link to the larger image.

With the meta tags there are two to consider, the meta keywords tag and the meta description tag. The meta keywords tag is close to useless and probably not necessary to include. You should, however, write a unique meta description for evey page on your site.

Know, though that meta tags are just a very small part of search engine optimization. There's a lot more to do if you want your pages to show in search results.

I wouldn't bother submitting sites to search engines. That doesn't really do anything either. Search engines will find your site as long as there are other sites linking to it. An easy thing you can do is to create a signature here on the forum and include a link to your site in your signature.

Those links will get your site indexed, but that's different than having them show up in search results. There's more work involved in appearing in search results. I'm guessing it's new to you so you might want to read through some of the threads in the SEO forums here.


Submitting to major search engines like Google and Yahoo is also no guarantee they will index your site. There's nothing wrong with submitting your site, but your time is better spent on other things, especially since submitting is no guarantee of being indexed.