Websites: Did You Build Your Own, Or Let Someone Else?
Business By countrycakes Updated 30 Mar 2007 , 3:21pm by KitchenKat
I am trying to get ideas for getting a website......have talked to Homestead, and they will charge me $200 to build my site. Is it hard? Can I do this myself? I just want a basic place with spots for prices and pictures.....how hard can this be? Oy vey! 
Advice needed.......and help! 
I built my own website. It costs $9.99 a month for the space and they gave me all the software for free. You could have one up fairly quick depending on how anal you are. Apparently I am anal... because I will venture to say I have easily spent over 200 hours on my site.
www.mypastrychef.com
i also did my own site. a lot of trial and error. i'd love to find time to rebuild it though. i got so hooked on trying to have everything on there, that i think i have too much. i used web easy 5. it was actually pretty easy.
I did my own, it is not that hard. I am getting ready to have it redone by a web designer for exchange for a wedding cake.
I went to www.freeservers.com and bought my domain name for $9.99 a year and they have free web page setup. However if you have the money. The $200 alternative would probably be able to be manipulated to exactly what you want. When I have the money I am going to get one done for about that cost and it will have everything I want on it. Plus the one I got from freeservers.com this past weekend I haven't quite figured out how to do everything.
If you want really basic & easy to do (and you aren't expecting a whole lot of traffic) geocities has a free option. I upgraded to get my own domain name, and I think I pay like $6 a month for it. I had a very simple one that I did myself, but my husband the computer geek went in and fancied it up for me.
www.queenbeecakes.com
Mine are thru register.com. I did the wedding one myself, but I'm fortunate that my son-in-law does computers for a living so he did the cookie one. I had the initial wedding one up and running in under 2 hours. I like being able to go in and make changes myself anytime I want/need to. On the cookie one, I have to give the changes to son-in-law for him to make. It looks nicer, but I miss the instant access.
I did mine thru googlepages.com. It is a service of Google and is really easy to do. I have around 70 or so pictures on the site and my memory is only 10% used, so it gives you tons of space. It's completely free. You just create as many pages as you want, upload the pics you want and rearrange them on the page. You can add words, links, whatever. I have spent a lot of time on mine, but I am very happy with it. I also have a site thru freewebs.com, but if you want it to be free, you are really limited, and it's not very user friendly at all. That's why I switched. I went for the free sites just because I am home based and didn't want to burn all my profit on a website. And I got brave and set up a myspace page and put a little plug in for the business there too. Never hurts.
I've built a website before (non cake related) - not as easy as I thought and I didn't enjoy doing it! I'm also planning a website for my cakes. This time I'm "paying" my soon-to-be 15YO son US$100 to do it. He can use the finished website to earn extra credit in school. "Paying" because I would have given him that money anyway with or without the website... .but I'm not telling him that. 
What I found most time consuming about building a website is the info I have to gather, the pictures, the write-ups, etc. Unfortunately whether I get someone to do it for me or not I'll still have to get these together.
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