Website Hosting Recommendations

for your home jewelry business

© by Rena Klingenberg; all rights reserved

Website hosting doesn't need to make a big dent in your jewelry business budget. If you do most things yourself, you can make an attractive and effective website very easily and cheaply, and have complete control over all aspects of your jewelry business’ web presence. And these days, people expect all businesses to have some sort of a website.

I don’t recommend relying on someone else to be your webmaster or manage your website, especially when you're first starting out. If you do, you’ll not only spend much more money than if you did everything yourself, but you’ll also be dependent on when they can get around to adding and changing things on your site. Sometimes that can be a long wait, and you’ll have to pay someone else to make every change you want to make.

Fortunately, building your own jewelry website can be very easy, so there’s no reason not to jump right in! First, decide on a company to do your website hosting. Shop around to compare the prices and goodies different website hosting companies offer.

Be sure that the website package you choose has room for your business to expand (some website hosting offers unlimited space), and examine their offerings for extra features such as:

• Your own domain name (meaning that your website URL doesn’t include the website hosting company’s name with your site as one of their subdomains);
  
• Adequate disk space (file storage) and bandwidth (file transfer capacity);
  
• Service that keeps your site online at least 99% of the time, without lots of outages and downtime that make your site inaccessible to visitors;
  
• Easy and responsive technical support when you have problems or questions;
  
• No advertising or popup ads on your site;
  
• E-email accounts;
  
• E-commerce / shopping cart built in;
  
• Built-in blogging tools for an easy, professional onsite blog;
  
• SSL server (secure server for handling transactions);
  
• Easy uploading of your text and images;
  
• Autoresponders;
  
• CGI-BIN (for running interactive scripts like counters, guestbooks, etc.);
  
• FrontPage extensions (if you design your own website using FrontPage software);
  
• Access to your website traffic reports / statistics;
  
• Regular backups of your site;
  
• A control panel that's not too technical to understand.
  

Okay, now let’s take a look at the other steps involved in building your own successful website:

Jewelry Business Website Tips for Success

Jewelry Website Resources
My top picks for jewelry business website resources, including web hosts, online credit card processing, other forms of online payments, and traffic building. For jewelry business websites, I think these services are the best of the best.

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