Hi all,

I'm very frustrated right now. I had a guy working on a website for me but he just wasn't doing what I had asked. It was very plain and well horrible. He was charging me a lot in my opionion for something not up to my expectations. So I was hoping I could get some feedback on how to make a website, or where to go with a website, or who to hire for a website. Anything!!! I really want a website and a professional looking one without a thousands of dollars price tag!!!

Any ideas, tips, suggestions would be appreciated...

Thanks,
dtmc

We are doing our own. We are having a little bit of a problem in that it looks perfectly fine in Explorer but not in Netscape or Mozilla. Unfortunately DH has been out of town a lot recently so hasn't had a chance to mess with it. I haven't kicked off my biz yet so we still have time to play around with it. We are using Godaddy.com.

Kristin

my husband bought, ''Web Easy professional'' and we set up my site. it was easy, i got to pick and choose the cake photos i wanted to use, pick the format etc. he found the program at best buy, im sure office max, etc. carries it. it cost much less then paying someone to do your web site. we can edit it anytime!
you just need to find a hosting site( i think thats what its called) i found one for around 100.00 a year, thats cheap.

and this is my second site. the first one looked kinda cheesey, we did it thru a program in our printshop deluxe. so he found the web easy i redid it and have gotten many, many compliments, and my business is much busier. plus the girls see a cake they like and say..i want that one.....

let us know how it goes for you....good luck.

www.qtcakeshome.net

I do two for us, one is mine, one is ours (DH and me). Both are done with Yahoo Site Builder, which you can download for free, and hosted at Yahoo for $19.95 a month. I like it; it's easy enough to do, and I can completely control any little change I want to make whenever I want to make it.

We've had people approach us to "manage" our sites for us, but we could hardly get them to return our calls, let alone manage to do what we want to our sites when we ask, so we're sticking with this for now.

I did mine thru register.com. You can get 5 pages for $4.95 a month. I upgraded to the 20 pages for $14.95 a month. I know nothing about websites and had the first 5 pages up and running, photos included, in under 2 hours.

My son-in-law, who does computers for a living, took a register.com format and did his magic to create our www.bannascookies.com site. I like the look of the cookie site MUCH better. He was going to work on the catering/wedding cake site, but then his school starting taking up his time, so Mom-In-Law here has taken a back seat!

There are lots of options out there (if you search, you may find some threads in which those options are listed for you .... I can't recall all of them) that won't cost you a programmer's time to keep it updated. YOu really can do it yourself.

I did mine on freewebs.com. I've gotten a lot of great feedback and it's very easy to use. I had to pay a little bit to get the ads off and to have it on some major search engines, but once I did that, I'm getting a ton of business from it. good luck.

I do mine on freewebs, too. It was easy to set up and I like the fact that I have control over it, i.e. I can change, update whenever I want.

I love free webs also!! It is very easy and there are a lot of templates to choose from. Good luck!

I just made my website with Homestead.com. I think it's $4.99 a month for 5 pages, and then goes up if more pages. I thought it was easy and had very professional-looking website templates.

I use Bravenet and it is free and easy to use. Just pick a template and build away. I just had to pay for the domain name.

Kristin-

I meant to post that I am having the exact same problem. Everyone says my website looks great except for my sister, said things are not lining up right, etc. I ended up putting a little disclaimer at the bottomof the home page: "Website best viewed using Internet Explorer."

Can you let me know if you figure out how to fix your problem? Maybe it will fix mine also.

I am a web designer, let me know if I can help you.

Here's my cake site:

http://www.eternalsweetheartcakes.com

Rachel

I think the best deal around is to use Template Monster (http://www.templatemonster.com/).

You can customize their pre-made designs, that look far more professional that most other options. And they are an awesome deal for the price.

Unfortunately, I already entered into a contract for $2,300 for my website before someone else told me about them. Boy, was I kicking myself. *sigh*

Designing a professional website will require you a lot of time if you're learning on how to do it at the same time. You may lose your time designing and decorating cakes for your customers.

A friend didn't have a website but she posted all her cakes to http://www.cakeamerica.com. I saw her postings and it looks ok though but as good if you do your website yourself.

I mean ...

A friend didn't have a website but she posted all her cakes to http://www.cakeamerica.com . I saw her postings and it looks ok though but as NOT AS good if you do your website yourself.

My dh does mine. He does webdesign on the side.

I built my own. It's very basic, but I've gotten a lot of compliments and a few other bakeris have asked me to do their site. NOT!! I didn't even want to do my own, but I was forced to.

After a "friend" who does sites strung me along and lied about when he'd be done for 6 weeks, I called on some web design skills I picked up at a previous job and went to Yahoo Small Business. I used Yahoo! Site Builder to build the site via a template, and I also got the domain name and monthly hosting through them ($12 or so a month). It's very easy to use but can be time consuming when you makes changes. Not hard though.

www.cookiebottomcakestudio.com

Oooh ooh ooh! Maybe I can help on this one for the ppl whose sites only work in IE! Mine was the saem way (I made it in Word) but after 2 years of putting it off I finally figured out what the problem was and fixed it. I posed a long thing about it on another board and I'm gonna go and copy it here for you all in just a sec.

I host with webhostingbuzz.com and I love them, its like $5 a month

First of all, its a super easy (not to mention FREE) way to make a site so I don't want to discourage anyone but here's a thing I learned the hard way about it...

So my site has never worked well with anything other than Internet Explorer. I didn't know what to do about it other than redoing the whole thing in a different program (which meant also buying and learning it) and I figured most people already use IE or at least have it on their PC if they run into a page like mine so I left it alone for the last 2 years.

Recently I got ambitious and looked a bit and stumbled upon what the problem was. You see, each series of cake photos was saved on a separate web page, then I had the main page which linked to all those pages. The internet uses slashes like this / and your PC documents use slashes like this \\ so as I was linking to files, it was using \\ by default. IE corrects for this so you'd never know it, but Firefox doesn't (lord help me, its the only other browser I'm looking at - please don't tell me there's other problems with others!!!) and so none of my pages except the front one would load. So I go through my WHOLE website and change all the \\ to /, upload, check, good to go.

NOW on to the SECOND part of the problem. I reopen the documents after hours of work only to find that my slashes have returned to the default of \\!! After searching I found that under Options there are TWO boxes checked that are for Word to automatically update your links (one upon opening and one upon saving). Oh how helpful! SO I unchecked those boxes, redid all the link work, and am uploading the revised pages as I type this. So far so good, but we'll really see once its all up.

If you guys want to check out the site (especially in other browsers) to make sure its bug free I would appreciate it.

I'm a former Massage/Yoga therapist, Herbalist and aromatherapist. I had my own website through Yahoo. I sold potions, lotions and oils. It took me 8 overhauls to get my site the exact way I wanted it. The first time took me 2 months to do by the 8th time I only needed 3 days.

When I say overhaul I mean starting from scratch each and every time.

Att this moment I do not have a website for my Cake business because I'm on website hiatus. When I'm ready and have the time and funds I will build another cake site. I at least know that this time it won't take very long to put it up and I know exactly what I want so it shouldn't be too much of a bother.

Thanks for the advice and tips.

I, too, utilized FreeWebs, then decided I wanted a domain name and went from there:

www.cakesunleashed.biz

I love having the liberty of doing as I please with MY website.

Best wishes on all your endeavors!

Deb