Being in online marketing (and some web development) for over 10 years, I decided to take a little bit of my knowledge and try to sell it. I see a big opportunity for small local businesses. To this day, there are too many horribly created websites out there. If they have a site at all! Costs have also come down too. I can only imagine that a lot of local small business owners are intimidated by the “interwebs.” I can also imagine a lot of companies charge an arm and a leg for services I can provide for very little cost.
I bought the domain and launched a coming soon page for my new endeavor over a year ago:
Target Local Web
It’s time to get my side business underway! I already have business cards printed up.
I made it a habit to check online for websites of local businesses that I frequent. Like I said before, 99% either stink or don’t exist.
The site still needs some design work. I’ve found working on WordPress and buying a developer’s licence to the Thesis Theme helpful in getting me over the one obstacle I need help with–design. I’m still tweaking and learning. I want to master both before taking on clients.
I know html and some css and everything else needed to know about how to put a website together. From hosting to domains to the pages to the seo to the architecture, etc. And beyond that– analytics, site submissions, etc. I also think I have a good set of low to no cost tools to make it all come together.
Venturing into WordPress was pretty painless. Prior I had been maintaining pages that were strictly html, like http://nycbbb.com/, which I built from scratch in 2002.
Converting nycbbb.com to WordPress is not worth the effort. I have a pretty efficient system down to update the site. And nothing’s necessarily wrong with it. I did, however put NYCBBB’s blog on WordPress - http://nycbbb.com/blog/ - again, design to come soon.
I was also able to successfully transfer NYCBBB’s blog over to WordPress, which had been hosted on Blogger. I wanted to see what was involved. I had pointed blogger to a subdomain a few months ago. After the transfer, I brought the subdomain back “inhouse” and 301 redirected all the old urls to the new with a rewrite rule. I have some inner geekdom that comes out. But it’s really not too geeky when you find all the answers on “the Google.”
On top of it all, I put my own personal site, http://mattsoreco.com/, on WordPress too. I need to get my money’s worth on the Thesis purchase before I start getting some clients! Plus it’s another site to test things out on. I’m debating folding this blog into WordPress and put it on http://mattsoreco.com/ fully. But like NYCBBB, is it worth the effort? I’d rather focus on Target Local Web. Decisions, decisions…
I’m glad I ventured into WordPress. I’m glad I bought the Thesis Theme to make it easy to customize. Static HTML sites are a pain in the neck to maintain since changes don’t cascade, not to mention having to FTP the files and keep them in sync.
One site did get hacked, which makes me nervous. I read up on security, and patched everything up (I think, I hope). I haven’t had WordPress more than a week and it was hacked in a matter of days…
Enough for now. Now I got some real work to do!