Develop Your Own Website

Tips for Getting Your
Jewelry Business Online by Yourself

While designing, building, and maintaining your own website selling jewellery (or for that matter any other item), you are certain to come across a number of areas where your knowledge will be a little lacking to get the job done!

I know that when I set about building my first site 4 years ago, my knowledge of computers and the internet was based on knowing how to turn a computer on, and knowing how to search the internet for help.

Since that point, I have completely redesigned my site 7 times (each time hopefully an improvement on the previous version) and taught myself every web programming language I have needed - from basic html, through dynamic html, javascript, asp, php, sql, cgi, and others.

However, that is only half the story; to be successful with your own website, you need to have visitors. You also need to convert those visitors into customers, and these two are probably the hardest stages of building a successful business (offline as well as on the internet). Every hurdle seems to result in yet another search for help, almost invariably meaning even more outlay of scarce funds.

What I would like to pass on in this article is that whilst paying other people for their services and knowledge sometimes seems to be the easiest way to go when building your own website, it is not necessary; in total I have spent nearly £2,000 setting up my site. Considering we now get over 1,000 new visitors each day, as well as the returning previous customers, this may seem like a very cheap setup - however, I could have done it for around £200!! The other £1800 has, in hindsight been wasted needlessly....

The first thing to search for when setting up your own website is a RELIABLE, cheap webhost.

The cheapest is not necessarily the best, as a visitor who tries to visit your site and is met with an error page is probably lost forever. However, just because a host is expensive, does not make them reliable!

Research the host before you commit - ask for a list of current customers, then visit their sites to see how quickly the pages load, and email the webmasters to ask their opinion (normally webmaster@domain.com will get you through to the right person).

This first choice is probably the single most important choice you will make regarding your own website - moving your site once it is established is certainly possible, but is costly, time consuming and means your site will be offline for a small period of time. My webhost is fantastic, but as this is not an advertising arena I will not mention them (email me if you want to know) - I will just tell you that in 4 years, my site has only been offline once for 2 seconds, I have 1GB of webspace and it only costs me £60 per year. Do your research, and I'm sure you can match this or beat it for your own website!

Next in line is site design. There are loads of software programmes out there for e-commerce, ranging in price from £50 through to £5000 plus - they all have their positives and pitfalls, but I have found that the very best, most flexible bits of software are actually free!

Try searching for open source e-commerce on any search engine, and the options are unbelievable. The only downfall is that you have to learn a modicum of programming, but at least that means you have complete control of your own site, and have an understanding of things so you can fix errors quickly and cheaply.

Personally I use osCommerce, with a whole heap of customisations (freely available from other users who have developed them). Yes, it has taken a lot of time to set up, but it has cost me nothing but time . . . . I have been told that to have my website professionally designed would have cost me in excess of £20,000! Again, do your research and you will find that instead of throwing money away, there are plenty of people out there who will GIVE this away for nothing, and will also give you free advice to help you get started building your own website.

The last field I want to touch on is website promotion and search engine optimisation. This can be an extremely expensive business if you start asking for other people to do it (I have been quoted £1,000 per MONTH!!), but with a little research you can do it yourself and get results which are nearly as good; try searching in any search engine for conflict free diamonds, and you will find my site, niknakgroup.com lurking near the top, and definitely no more than 15 listings down - not bad for an amateur?! Again, a bit of research will get you all the information you need, normally for free.

So, to summarise, the most important thing I have had to learn when developing my site has been how to use the search engines to their best advantage. If your first search doesn't get the results you need, try becoming a typing thesaurus and use a slightly different phrasing or word - get to know your search engine and how it works, and the results you get back will be priceless.

The only thing a well designed and profitable website need cost you is time, and the rewards for your investment will prove well worth it!

Good luck!

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