Web Design

I had no idea the costs involved in website design for online sales or "e-commerce".  Today I obtained quotes from $2500+gst right through to a potential $20,000.  These are all just quotes however and some of these cheaper designers may not have delivered, meaning a waste of $2500+ and my time.  It can also take the design team anywhere from 15-48 hours of work to create your website, more of course if you aren't happy with the creative process and outcomes.

This morning I had the absolute pleasure of talking with Peter at Enlighten Design The team here are really and truly fantastic.  They gave me such genuine advice, and I felt that if I chose them I would be getting a totally customised, search engine optimised, fully operational and highly spec-ed website.  Unfortunately our budget can't stretch as far as I would like it to in order to employ these people, but if money grew on trees they would certainly be my first pick.  However if money grew on trees I wouldn't have bought this business in the first place!

Again today has presented yet another learning curve, when a web designer asks you what do you want your site to do, "Sell stuff" isn't the answer they are looking for!

Create your dream website, with all the whizz bang bells and whistles you can think of.  You may not need them all now, but it pays to see if the web creators you are going to employ know how to do this stuff.  For me, I found it hard to understand which of my bells and whistles were going to cost me my arm and leg in programming/coding, and which were standard things offered by the "e-platform" (new word today, and I'm pretty handy at dropping in "e-commerce" now too!) the company would use for our site.  There are also many "plug-ins" (really extending my vocab today) available that could easily do what you need too.

For example, we will be running MYOB software for our accounting side of the business (a whole new language for me to decipher) and there are apparently plug-ins for inventory control that work with MYOB and your inventory system to allow a "low stock" message to be sent to you warning to order more stock in, and when items are out of stock, not only does MYOB remind you to order in but the plug-in posts an "out of stock" message on the website for customers to see.

Nothing annoys me more as an on-line shopper than purchasing something on-line only to find out that I can't have it.  Broken links in a website also drive me insane.  So I apologise right now to any of my customers out there - I am still in set up phase, please be patient while I get my new bells and whistles up and running on the website!  In the meantime, email any orders to me and you can pay using internet banking.

It is frustrating for me too.  I want things happening now, but so many of these things in these early days of setting up a business just take time.  Time to discover what the problems are, time to find the right people to fix it, time and money invested in stock and advertising, and time to get the return on your investment.

Time is a great healer - but by god its frustrating too!