Sunday, November 22, 2009

Why You Shouldn’t Barter for a Web Site


Although I believe empowering yourself with website building knowledge first. you might think this might go against my blog entry on barter earlier this week, I recommend against bartering for web work.

The only thing I can think of comparing bartering for web work for is like being married and not in love…. really truly not in love.

My family traded website work for our gallery to a designer that owed my uncle money. Since it was barter, the web site work was always the last thing on his “to-do” list. When it was finally finished two years later, it was already time to update it. Guess what? He didn’t have time for that additional work. Can you imagine the frustration of having to explain to a potential gallery or venue that you have a web site, but it isn't up to date?

Bite the bullet. Gone are the days when you had to either learn html, a difficult program or depend on a web-designer to build your website. If you can use the cut-and- paste feature on Micrsoftword you can build, manage, and update your own website on your schedule, not some web designers! Now, almost every hosting company has a free web site building program that is easy to use.

I recommend Yahoo Sitebuilder or Mac Website builder because those are the two that I’m most familiar with. Both are free programs that allow you to build a website for free. Hosting is now as little as $12.95 month. With programs such as this, there is a very minimal learning curve and if you want to add Paypal buttons, audio, or video it’s simply a matter of cutting and pasting these components into your website. The best thing about Sitebuilder is that it comes with a 24/7 toll free help number.

3 comments:

  1. MSN has an excellent website building program as well that is as easy as can be, and free. They also have decent analytics to see how the website is doing - how many visitors/day, from where, etc. Cool stuff. You can also get very cheap website hosting from 1and1.com - $4/month or something like that.

    I agree about designing ones own site. I had a friend do my first one. He did an awesome job, but I always felt a little bit awkward asking him to update it. Now I update mine at least once/week, making it much more interesting for people to come back to again and again.

    Susan Singer
    www.susansinger.com
    susansingerart.blogspot.com

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  2. I use Weebly.com. It's got a drag-and-drop element system that makes Web design a snap (especially if you're a visual learner... no html code knowledge required!). The drag-and-drop feature necessarily limits design options BUT I find the templates and options are enough to create a good looking web site (and like most creatives, I find limits a challenge I like to take on).
    It's free, but I sprang for the pro account so that I could add audio files.

    Tim Ereneta
    www.timereneta.com

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  3. Thanks for adding these additional options. I'll be sure to include them in my classes as well.

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