Website setup

[Barkleymut]

I need some help forming a new website. Some questions I have are. 1. Kirby mentioned once that he used icom.com it costs 8.25/month. Eric I believe has a free service. Is it worth it to pay to have a website? I realize I still have to design and update the site and that this fee is just for hosting. 2. Is there any way to link up to Yahoo so that when someone types in "lawn care Richmond" it gives my site as a result? Any help would be greatly appreciated.

 

[Eric ELM]

Mine cost $13.50 a year for a domain name.
My host was $10 a month for the first year and $8 something a month for the second year. You can get free places all over, but they usually have banners scrolling across your pages. http://www.bizland.com is an example, I have a second site there just in case my other for some reason isn't working.
You can list your site with all search engines. Some are free and some cost you money to list with them, but yes, you can get listed.

You can also get a domain name and have it link to a free server, but you still have the banners and ads on it. If you get one job a month from the results of having a website, it would be worth the time and money.

 

[KirbysLawn]

Free is not totally free, as Eric said banners pay the bills and will be placed on the site and you have no control over this. The $8.25 fee is for hosting and there is no extra charge for uploading or updates.

As for the search engines I manually enter mine in the major ones. I have done other sites and the site owners paid one of the registeration services, they never show up and if they do they are never at the top. A waste of money in my opinion.

I have used Submit Wolf ( http://www.submitwolf.com ) demo and it seems to be a good program, it will do 7 or so for free. Take the time to do it yourself.

Ray

 

[Administrator]

I now sponsor ThinkHost which I use. Check out http://www.lawnhost.com

The most important thing about a host is their reliability and tech support. ThinkHost.com is the #1 on the internet as far as I am concerned. They run their machines through RackSpace which has the best backbone out there.

For $14.99 a month you can get an account that will host up to 2 domains! Right now the thinkhost support team is setting up business web templates designed specially for the turf industry. ( for lawnsite.com members )

You guys should seriously consider http://www.lawnhost.com

Chuck Keough
LawnSite.com

 

[Eric ELM]

This sounds neat.

 

[gusbuster]

Barkleymut

So you can see the difference between a paysite and a free site, here are 2 links that you can check out. One (free one)was my old site that I was using, the other is my current one.

This is a free web hosting site. When someone would go to your site they would have to put up with these pop up banners; the link is:
http://curutchetlandscaping.bizland.com/

My new web host cost me $9.95 a month for 25 mb of storage space, 10 email adresses. Domain name reg was for 2 years 24.95. You can run asp,ssl, and one neat option that i like is I can see where the traffic(ip numbers )are comming from. The link is:
http://jlclandscaping.com

The bizland site doesn't support FrontPage 2000 well. I set up my site using their templates. For my new site I used FrontPage 2000 , though you can get a free copy from micorsoft of FrontPage Express if it isn't already on your computer. FrontPage Express is just a baby brother of FP2000
Got any more questions, feel free to email me.
John

 

[TGCummings]

Another advantage of a pay site that I can think of is it will motivate you to work on it. You're paying, therefore it becomes a priority.

-TGC

 

[jkinchla]

I pay for my hosting and it is worth every penny. Check out http://www.bcnsolutions.com they host my site and it only costs $5/month. I couldn't be happier and their service is quite good.

Whatever host you wind up choosing, I would pay to avoid the banner ads that come with free hosting. You get what you pay for, and those banner ads don't project a professional image to your customers.

 

[Groundcover Solutions]

I have a free site and it is prety good i think. The site is http://www.contractor.com/hometown

The put you in a list of contractors of your area too.
it is a grate site http://www.contractor.com