Any advice on website would be appreciated

[michelleC]

Well ive been selling on e-bay quite successfully for a few months. we get a lot of traffic and sales have been good. The fees we are paying are a little high though. on avarage about £45.oo a month. Was thinking would i be better to pull my finger out and get our own site set up.
Where's the best place for hosting. how to increase traffic etc.

[Cloverst]

I am no good with standard web design and so I use packages with design tamplates but they are hard to get listed. I'm not a listing guruu and would love any help there myself!

I have 2 different setups, one is free hosting with freewebs with a domain name pointing to it, this way you can have a simple domain but not fork out for hosting costs. Take a look at the link in my sig for an example of this.

The other I have is instant site with 123 reg. Both have really good designs, are really easy to set up and look professional.

Be wary of those selling hosting packages though. When i was starting out in the land of web pages I took on a hosting pagkage. I found that I had to design my own site as the builder was limited, I didn't know html so it looked pants! Also some of the stuff I paid for in my monthly fee I never used like huge bandwidth and disk space.

It's worth shopping around and enlisting the help of others who have been through it.

[handmadeheaven.biz]

i currently use mrsite.com. it has templates for designs as well as extras like shopping carts and galleries, newsletters, blogs, guestbooks, contact forms, easy file uploading etc. it's great for me as it gives me more time to be making things for it than designing a website from scratch & the best thing about it is you can edit it from ANY COMPUTER. you can use a simple editor and change fonts etc like you would in word, or if you know any html (or want to input things like paypal code) you can edit all the html for the page as well. it does have some flaws like amount of keywords, optimising for searches but i think they are putting together a package to help you optimise the site very soon. it's £35 for the first year then about twenty-something after that.


good luck

[edenworkshops]

I also sell on eBay

I have also been selling on eBay for a while, about 4 years.

I came to the conclusion last year that I wanted to get away from eBay and really start marketing our own sites.

A year later our home page is on the first page of Google for the keyword "bookbinding" which is the most competitive keyword in our lexicon, and other pages get good rankings too.

Another six months and maybe we can leave eBay altogether.

Richard

[littlenipper]

My new website

I have just set up a new website with Ekm powershop. Sorry I'm not yet allowed to post the link). It's £50 set up then about £20 per month. The templates are quite basic but very easy to use and for an extra fee they will design one for you.

There is no contract involved so I plan to run with the template I have chosen and when the website is generating enough business I'll pay for a more sophisticated design. Either way it's a good starting point.

[kathleen]

web site

Hello

I use do your own web site. Its very good and not too expensive. Send me a private message if you want the details

[sandart]

i use a good host pm for details
very powerfull / online chat help line / cant fault them really

make sure u avoide resellers and small companies

and even if u r listing on e bay host the photo files on your host and that should save you allot om ebay img fee


and yes go for it

it cost nothing to run and a bit of an investment to start

can recomend a designer as well pm if u need any help in marketing it as well

ive been throw hell learning how to do it lol

[Kiamyka]

Some good advice here- you could also look at Ebid as an alternative to Ebay- it's been running about 9 years and is more of a Buy it Now rather than an auction site - recently lots of ebay sellers have moved over to it too. Check out the levels of membership - I started off on the low one but every so often they have offers and any fees you have already paid come off the cost of the top membership . Im not currently selling there simple beacause i am too busy with my own sites but its worth a shot, especially when you are trying to launch a new site. the forums are helpful although the Kitchen table (general chat) can get quite erm heated. If you post questions on the right forum though people help. If you join, show your commitment by buying a few things and getting some feedback. If you choose the right listing method its free to list.