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scott kozub

scott kozub

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Jan 1, 2018
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Sorry if this is off topic. I've been doing this as a hobby for a little over a year now selling to family and friends. I keep getting asked for info and figure it's time to make a website.

I don't have any concerns making one. I'm just curious if anyone here made their own, which service they used, opinions and cost both initial and maintaining.

For now I just need a place to showcase stuff. I'm trying to build inventory for a handmade market but keep selling everything so all I have is pictures. I intend to advertise in stock options but some day may add a custom order feature where the user can pick aspects and build a knife. That's way off in the future though.

Just curious of any tips experience.
 
I have experience with 4 different presence providers.
I am sure this question will yield a wide variety of opinions.

I personally use Deamhost, which I have had pretty much since the beginning in the mid to late 90s. I got an unlimited bandwidth deal and pay $120 annually for unlimited hosting and bandwidth, although my small presence is nothing that would stress even the most modest server.

I have done pages for folks using GoDaddy - and that seemed to work well and was fairly inexpensive - they have web page makers that are fairly easy to use and get someone without much experience going without much fanfare.

The other two providers are for sites I maintain for a local organization and a forum, and those are both very similar in the tools and panel setups to the Dreamhost site - so there really isn't much difference. All of them seem to be reliable with minimal outages.

Good luck -

best

mqqn
 
I use Squarespace. More expensive, but hassle free. I rarely sell anything on it, but I like having the presence.
 
My wife’s business website is on Squarespace. It is very good and you can do more advanced things with help from their excellent customer support. My website uses Wordpress through a 3rd party hosting service and while doing it that way was cheaper I wouldn’t call it better. It is also more focused on blogging where Squarespace is a little more versatile.
 
I've tried a couple of the most common ones and liked Squarespace the most. It was easy to set up and they have good FAQs and online help. Bear in mind though that my website is fairly basic and doesn't require any fancy technical functionality.
 
You can have a look at my site - it's done with google sites. Super easy to set up, completely free etc..

If you want something a bit more custom and just want to show off pictures you can probably download some CSS template and do the HTML yourself (really not that hard) and since traffic probably isn't in the thousands-of-users-a-minute range you may even be able to get away with running a small webserver locally (There probably are tons of tutorials on how to do that online too).

The upsides of the second solution would be having the cost of a domain (which is super cheap) and no further cost.
 
Another vote for squarespace. I set it up myself and I'm not super tech savvy. I don't do e-commerce off my site just a place to house pictures of my work.
 
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