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Looking for Website Design & Cost

Stacey K

I like making signs
I use WIX but I get it if you don't want to take the time to do it. It can be a little time consuming.

I agree with Texas... Signcompanywebsites...those sites look pretty good. If a person isn't selling products it's just a matter of updating photos here and there and it looks like that would work well for your purpose.
 

rjssigns

Active Member
If you have Adobe CC use Portfolio. You're paying for it may as well use it. And it's the easiest way I've found to build a responsive site. All the heavy lifting(what makes a site work) is done in the background. Adobe also allows you to create up to five sites and will also host on the cheap. Small learning curve but is nearly drag and drop easy for adding content. Stupid easy to change colors, backgrounds etc...without having to resort to line by line coding in something like Brackets.

If you don't want Adobe to host try GoDaddy. It's what we use.
 

FASTSIGNS

New Member
The local fastsigns has the standard site, it's pretty bad, Hard to navigate, and none of the images of work is actually work that shop did, they just use images from other fastsigns.

To answer the original question, anticipate paying a professional around $700 -$1000 for a basic site. Or look into something like WordPress and do it yourself with a theme.
Yes! I totally agree! FS has had this layout for several years. Never been a fan. Hoping for a revamp soon.
 

FASTSIGNS

New Member
Are you guys stuck using the FSI website or free to do your own thing?
We can add content - local pics, staff, catalogue. FS has a huge variety of content to change things up. But the overall look and feel is the same (which I don’t like). So to answer your question, yes, we can do our own thing within the FS framework and through FS.
 

Pauly

Printrade.com.au
With web design, it doesn't really need to be someone local, I can PM you the name of my guy up here in Canada, he uses wordpress, you host on your own server for no extra fee, and as an added bonus the US Dollar is worth $1.25 right now, so you are already getting a 25% discount lol.

There used to be a merchant member on here years ago who offered various "pre made" website specific to the sign industry, I think it was this guy: https://signcompanywebsites.com/
Damn the demo sites from "signcompanywebsites" are quite dated. all those visual and 3d effects.. looks like 1999.

Wordpress is probably the go to these days. Prefer it over WIX.
You could set up a decent portfolio site with wordpress and just pay hosting. You dont need a page builder like elementor or fusion builder as mentioned earlier.
Heaps of free templates and tools.
 

tulsagraphics

New Member
In addition to my sign business of 21 years, I have a development and hosting company (maintaining 400 websites across 11 dedicated servers for 180 clients). I've used many different CMSs over the years (since 2005). Wordpress has been the easiest to work with all around (for development and for clients). I like Wordpress a lot because it has a robust community, is very well documented and there are a ton of great developers for it (90% of everything you need can be done without the high expense of custom programming). When searching for a developer -- focus hard on the developers' portfolios. Look for creativity and out of the box thinking, ease of use / mobile friendliness, etc. He/she should demonstrate marketing proficiency and have experience developing for a wide variety of industries (not a one-trick-pony).

Tips:
Avoid using free/cheap templates (get something that's lightweight and coded well). A decent theme/framework is probably going to be under $60-80 anyway -- no biggie. This is just a starting point (how your developer uses the framework is key). And yes, you can get very good hosting for $25-35/mo. -- look for companies that are optimized for Wordpress, like wpengine. Try to avoid any of the cheapo hosting companies because they are very noisy and overpopulated (struggling for resources, sharing the same IP as everyone else, including those who are flagged for abuse, infected, or otherwise. It can be difficult or nearly impossible to get off blacklists. Emails from your website constantly going to spam, etc). Stay away from marketing agencies. Look for small development teams instead. You can go with a solo/freelancer for less money, but freelancers are notoriously bad about going MIA!

Development:
Static content is the easiest part -- 70-80% of your website can be built within 2 or 3 weeks (assuming you're in good contact with the developer and can respond to his/her questions pretty quickly). It's very helpful to have some content ready for your developer so they don't have to guess/extrapolate based on Google / FB searches alone. You certainly don't want them using copyrighted content or copying/pasting info/articles from other websites. If a developer is trying to charge you more than say... 1.5k to 2k to get most of this initial phase done... keep searching! Outside of that, your basic startup costs will probably need to include a few hundred per year in software licenses (e.g., Gravity Forms, Schema, SEO, and maybe 1 or 2 others). Your dev should implement a really good form plugin, a very good (very fast) portfolio / gallery mechanism, and set up SEO/sitemaps. Then, if you need some slick functionality... your forms can be linked to 3rd party services to improve your workflow (e.g., uploads automatically going to Dropbox, JPG quick proofs being sent to Slack or email or whatever, receiving a text message when someone places an order or requests an appointment, etc.).

E-commerce is where the bulk of the work (and expense) comes in, especially in the sign industry where your products require things like:
- custom / dynamic attributes
- calculating cost based on dimensions or square footage.
- quantity breaks (per piece, per sq.ft., per linear yard)
- dynamically calculated discounts
- role-based discounts (retail, wholesale, etc), as well as
- payment and shipping integrations.

If you plan on selling products on Google Shopping or other channels (or at the very least having rich data populated in Google search), the proper schema / markup needs to be added to the site/products (e.g., SKU, title, description, price, sale, reviews, etc. etc.). Your site should also be registered with Google Webmaster Tools / Analytics so you can figure out what works (or doesn't work) and make adjustments as needed over time.

A great website can be your best asset, and it shouldn't require a huge financial investment to make it happen. When I build websites for folks, I look far beyond the initial inquiry / consultation. I think about the entire project from the clients' perspective (e.g., R.O.I.), because that is usually their primary concern. If I can make them happy (with proven results over time), I earn their trust and potentially a client for "life". So that's kind of what you want to find in a developer -- someone who is interested in a long term relationship.

Done properly, a website should more than pay for itself within the first 12 to 18 months. Plan on upgrading your website every 3 to 4 years so it can be adapted to whatever the latest standards are (upgrades are less expensive than new builds, of course).

Hope that helps!
 

Stacey K

I like making signs
One thing I noticed lately is people making one page websites (or very few pages). Most of the info is on the home page, location/map, contact info, quote button, about us...personally I really like that. They seem clean and simple to me. No need to be clicking a million times.
 

DPD

New Member
We need to replace our website. Does anyone here do custom sites? What would be the ballpark range for a nice turn key site about 5-6 pages run to build?
Sounds like you'll manage this site yourself because you seem to have a URL and at least a shared server? Are you planning on owning the code for your website? If you are subbing the site out and your budget is not in the thousands then will need a small (even one-person) SEO/SEM agency. Midrange pricing runs (last I looked) $5000 for site setup and your first month of ads and $2500 ongoing for one-year of ads on google + a bit of SEM. A one-person agency may do the work for $100 per page (probably more as these are old prices) and you may/may not own the code. You also get no SEM and very little SEO if your budget is low. Warning: my pricing may actually be low. I'm going on past experience.

Generally, one-person shops can't provide the SEM that you will need to make any significant money from your site because it takes hours of work to create that SEM strategy that you might think is easy to do. Like any business, the one-person shop must move on and get to the next customer so (s)he is not really interested in the SEO/SEM part of this. The explanation is out of scope for this reply but this is why it takes a mid-level agency or higher to produce meaningful website results=income from your website. You'd get bug-eyed if you knew what a Fast-Signs or similar paid for SEM.

If you are not in the vehicle wrap or electrical sign part of the sign business then you may be better off doing it yourself.

Good luck with it.
 

DPD

New Member
One thing I noticed lately is people making one page websites (or very few pages). Most of the info is on the home page, location/map, contact info, quote button, about us...personally I really like that. They seem clean and simple to me. No need to be clicking a million times.
1-5 pages works for a sign company that is not in the vehicle wrap or electrical sign part of this business. One landing page for general info, your product page, and a contact page - that's all that's needed. Vehicle wrap and electrical are in an adwords class that has some giddyup otherwise there's not much going on locally for other adwords ads. Such sign companies can actually justify the SEO/SEM agency spend needed to bring in the bacon.
 

kcollinsdesign

Old member
If it is really just a portfolio place and directing people to contact you thru email/phone etc, that should be able to be handled easily with HTML/CSS and that is fairly easy to do yourself.

Now, if you are looking at an online store, complex forms, client portals etc, that's something else entirely. If you look at your CPanel for your site now (or what passes for the CPanel depending on what your hosting service uses on the server, although I would imagine that it is RHEL), should be able to have plugins etc that allow you to easily get something else up on your own as well. Even with the more difficult online shopping etc type of needs.

One thing that I would caution with the the point and click type of site builders is that most people do not tend to style those radically different so sites all start to look the same. So while they do make things easier, they also make things look the same and for those that think that the internet space is a visual blight on the eyes, that's partially the problem right there. So keep that in mind as well. Another thing about those that I don't tend to like is that you are at the mercy of the people that made whatever plugins that you used to keep them up to date as well. So if you are unable to tweak things when necessary yourself, that may be another concern to think about.

If it's not needing a lot of interactivity and CRUD work, it should be easy enough to do a nice website and still have some animation etc (it's amazing what one can do (and should do) with CSS nowadays and not have to rely on JS) and be able to do it yourself.
So I need to know HTML, CSS, client portals, CPanels, RHEL, plugins, CRUD, and JS? I suppose once I figure out what all that is it would be "fairly easy to do myself". Uh huh.
 

Ready

Ready To Go

Pauly

Printrade.com.au
One thing I noticed lately is people making one page websites (or very few pages). Most of the info is on the home page, location/map, contact info, quote button, about us...personally I really like that. They seem clean and simple to me. No need to be clicking a million times.
Depends on what you do. I just checked my site and its currently has 29 pages + 15 ecommerce product pages.
15 out of the 29 pages are product description pages for users that are logged out looking for information. When you log in, you'll have access to the actual products and make purchases.
We try to provide as much info as we can to save clients from walking away unsure.
Our front page as a good summary of what we can do for those who don't like clicking around. And for those wanting to look further around, we have the list of products we produce with information about each one. For those who want to do more reading, we've started a blog that tells a bit about our business path and some tips for our clients.
 

DPD

New Member
So I need to know HTML, CSS, client portals, CPanels, RHEL, plugins, CRUD, and JS? I suppose once I figure out what all that is it would be "fairly easy to do myself". Uh huh.
I know you don't mean that but anyway, you really only need a fraction of what you just said. You just need to know what you need to know to get the job done.

A brochure website would be HTML, CSS, and maybe JS. Then you would use some underlying technology like Bootstrap. A problem arises though in that unless you understand coding you are not going to optimize for google (I'm not talking about keywords here I'm talking about optimized code so google knows what you are doing. Think of it like talking to the Google search engine and telling it about your site). Then, if you want more than a brochure website, you will need to learn other technologies. For example, do you want to connect to UPS to do shipping? I used to use JQuery for that but it's not done that way any longer. Now there's a faster and easier way to connect. Do you need something like JQuery (outdated) to do the job? No but some websites still use it and its ubiquitous. You're always going to be learning something and that's why Computer Technology is a profession and not a hobby.

In another post I spoke about costs for hiring people that know what they are doing and the costs for getting yourself ranked in google - which is becoming more difficult as google is more and more favoring the paid client over the organic search by leaving less room on the page for the organic. I am not in the business and I'm not trolling for business. I just happen to know what it costs to achieve anything meaningful.

If you really want to know what your competition is doing its easy to find out. 1) go to their website and look at the underlying code. 2) find out what their ad spend may be (they may not be advertising and this'll take other software) 3) see how old their URL is. 4) find out how many ads of different types they are running for their money 4) what keywords are their ads targeting (not the same as organic which is not really reliant on keywords. OK go argue the point with me.) 5) learn how to write optimized ads 6) yadda yadda. Then go look at Vista Print, Displays to Go, even Fast Signs corporate etc. Do you know what their ad spend might be? Do you think you will match their ad spend? Can you? What I just described is the SEM part of this equation and I haven't scratched the surface.

Yup, after you get that HTML, CSS website up and running the rest is a piece of cake.
 

WildWestDesigns

Active Member
So I need to know HTML, CSS, client portals, CPanels, RHEL, plugins, CRUD, and JS? I suppose once I figure out what all that is it would be "fairly easy to do myself". Uh huh.
Not at all. In fact, I actually said that if it's not alot of interactivity and CRUD work, it should be easy enough to do.

RHEL/CentOS etc, aren't really something that most on here will have to know, unless self hosting and running everything yourself, well more then likely CentOS as RHEL (at least used to, I think IBM has changed some things since they bought Red Hat, which I think is why people are moving from even CentOS as well), as I can't imagine people on here want to deal with the service contract (or build RHEL from source to get it for free, I think cost has changed for RHEL though now). Now CPanel, I would argue, if one is the admin of their own website and not paying someone, then should be able to navigate through CPanel, but that could just be me.

I have noticed that quite a few people on here I can think of, tend to add a lot more roadblocks then actually do exist when it comes to doing something along these lines. Don't want to do it, that's fine, to each their own, but that doesn't mean that it is the herculean process that most make it out to be. It very much has a learning curve and there needs to be a desire to do it, but the way things are now, it is significantly easier then when I was back in HS that's for sure. And it was just an option. I have found as I have gotten older, that I tend to like to not be as beholding to other vendors as much as I can be that is realistically feasible.
 

David40

New Member
As a printer you must know layout and design it's part of your business. For years I have used WYSIWYG web builder. You don't need to know code, and it works just like Flexi or Corel, or any other graphical interface software. You design and layout your pages with the wide range of available components and publish it right to your host directly from the program. Makes changing and updating things very easy.
 

Pauly

Printrade.com.au
As a printer you must know layout and design it's part of your business. For years I have used WYSIWYG web builder. You don't need to know code, and it works just like Flexi or Corel, or any other graphical interface software. You design and layout your pages with the wide range of available components and publish it right to your host directly from the program. Makes changing and updating things very easy.
As a printer, you don't need to know layout and design. As a printer, you need to know how to operate and maintain the equipment.
As a designer, you must know layout and design...
 

WildWestDesigns

Active Member
As a printer, you don't need to know layout and design. As a printer, you need to know how to operate and maintain the equipment.
As a designer, you must know layout and design...
I have always been an advocate for some cross pollination of knowledge among departments.

As a printer you must know layout and design it's part of your business. For years I have used WYSIWYG web builder. You don't need to know code, and it works just like Flexi or Corel, or any other graphical interface software. You design and layout your pages with the wide range of available components and publish it right to your host directly from the program. Makes changing and updating things very easy.
I've usually advocate learning the tough bits first and then go to the easier method when able as when something does go wrong, have the background to deal with it. But that's in an ideal situation. I must admit there are neat tools like Figma out there that really do help in the process. Hell, people can use Inkscape's native SVG format and use that for UIs as well (Inkscape handles SVGs a whole better compared to Ai for this specific application(web work)).
 

Notarealsignguy

Arial - it's almost helvetica
I got the site done, I just laid it out in Corel and found a guy on Fiverr to set it up. I contacted a company someone here recommended but they didn't respond. It worked out. I'm not Walmart and we're pretty established so all the fancy stuff and seo doesn't matter to me.
 
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