HI all....I have been with Homestead for several years now....the past year or so, business has been DOWN, as in none....it's suddenly picking up again. My website is soon going to be up for renewal...and I don't know if I want to spend the $ it is going to require...I also am on Facebook and do a lot via word of mouth. I do a lot of birthday cakes and party cakes...the wedding business is just getting going again for me.....money is just a little tighter now that what it was several years ago (but then again, whose is not?!).

Tell me about your sites.....costs, ease of use in doing it yourself, easy to access...etc. You know what I am talking about. Thanks for any help.

I use Google sites. It's fairly easy to navigate through, but you have to have a basic knowledge of how websites work, how to get within search engines as far as keywords, links, etc., and a general idea of HTML.

It's $10.00 a year. Your domain is registered through either GoDaddy or Enom, Google acts as a third party. So, at anytime you can pick up and leave Google sites if you want to host elsewhere.

Check mine out:
www.roanokecakes.com
www.onebitedelights.com

BUMP!

What about a blog? You can set it up to look like a website and it's easy to do by yourself.

I use wix.com. They have a ton of free templates to choose from, then you just customize it yourself. Little to no knowledge of html or web terminology needed. I did go ahead and buy my domain name, and I can link my free site to the domain name through my registrar. Wix has the option of upgrading for more features, but I'm not making enough money to justify that just yet.

I'm not happy with the fact that I'm pretty low on Google's list, but I think that may have to do with the template that I chose. I've worked around that by listing my page on several party planning websites, and my facebook page comes up pretty high on a search. I've gotten a good bit of business from both.

Good luck!

I just changed over to Weebly.com I used to use Google but I found my site hard to manipulate and just didn't like the overall setup. I have found Weebly to be very user friendly and you can use the free version or you can pay a yearly fee so you don't see the "create a free website using Weebly" at the bottom of the pages.

Mine is still a work in progress but you can take a look at how it is set up so far!

www.brandielynn.com

I built my own website using a drag and drop kind of program called Coffeecup Visual Site Designer. The program cost me $49.00 and is really simple to use. It came with some templates, but I just designed my own, since I have some basic HTML knowledge.

I have mine hosted through ipage.com, which costs me somewhere around $50.00 a year, and I get my own domain name and several email addresses.

To be honest, my business would be down 80% if I didn't renew my domain so I say make sure to keep it....it's only $12 or so. What are your maintenance fees to keep your site going (besides hosting)?

I'm a firm believer that a good looking site will get a lot of clients. Be careful what type of website you pick since Google doesn't like some things. To me it's better to pay some money to look good and have a 'google' friendly site so your site can rank. If you are looking at website builder/website development options I would research and pick three, then find out which one is most SEO friendly.

I also have homestead and have been very disappointed lately. Customes have been reporting issues as well, which is not good.

Pages are taking longer to load. I pay for unlimited pages and have not been able to publish 2. My renewal is due, however they have me connected to all the search engines and I hesitiate to disrupt that.

So what to do...I am not happy with them, yet I don't want to loose the connection with the major search engines either

I paid a good friend who has a web business to do mine...his father is the host and there is NEVER down time or problems with it. I love my site, and it really helps my business a lot.....

Whatever you do...keep up a website. Today's brides are all about the internet. That is how most do there seraching, so if you want customers, then keep a website. I was really surprised how much more business I got when I updated my site a year ago.