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Starting From Scratch

The journey of building an online business from scratch...

Author: A. Deaver

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In the company of my most recent employment, I often speak with clients that are unsatisfied with their website. Most of the time, it has something to do with not appearing in the top results of Google or Yahoo. I inform our beloved customers that even if the company specialized in SEO (which it does not), we submit their sites to the search engines, but cannot guarantee a top spot in search rankings. I do have some advice to give our customers, though, mostly encouraging them to make the site’s content informative, yet succinct. Any advice more complicated than that tends to confuse most clients.

Although I think the advice I give helps immensely, our customers’ sites often have… problems. Some of them have insisted on having a fancy font used throughout their website, which means images are used in place of text. Others mention only in passing what their services or products are. And yet others leave the site as-is for months on end without updating any content. Many of you reading should know that these things will ruin a site’s effectiveness.

As my wife and I discussed this trend, she came up with an idea for a business. She suggested that we could provide writing services for those people that look for more out of their website, but don’t know how to achieve it. This was right up our alley, since I will be graduating with a B.A. in English soon, and she knows a good deal about websites herself. It was very exciting to discuss, and neither of us ever mentioned not following through with it.

The idea was the beginning, and we knew it. Our foremost difficulties were as follows:

• Getting a domain. Any registrar would do, but we certainly had to find one that was relatively short, informative, and was available as a .com domain. Two days and several scribbled pages of paper later, we found an available domain that we were satisfied with.

• Hosting. We didn’t set up space for the site right away, but we did perform some research an affordable, dependable hosting company. With the help from some helpful articles and the BBB website, we settled on Hostgator (they “eat up the competition!”) to fit our needs. Yours could be different.

• Building a site. Simple, elegant, and attractive. We went through many, many drafts that we were wholly pleased with, but discovered that certain coding techniques would not be search engine-friendly, or certain dimensions would display poorly on a different screen resolution.

• Our own content. Well, if we were going to offer writing services, my own writing had better be pretty good, don’t you think?

After these steps (and a few others) were completed, we set out to promote our site. I’m not sure many people realize just how easy it is to submit your site to a search engine once it’s completed, but it’s just a matter of typing in the URL into a box and clicking “submit.” Perhaps most of our elders think the employees of the Internet are all in the same building… we just have to holler from the design cubicle to the Google and Yahoo offices just down the hallway: “Hey, Larry! Can you put this guy’s site up at, oh, about number five on searches for ‘catapults’?” “Sure thing, Bob.”

We’re up to the point where we have a site, but want to improve on it consistently. Every site out there is trying to get the most visitors it can, so we’re trying to make our own site as inviting as possible. We also understand that the plan may not go so well, so our hosting and intangible investments may all amount to nothing.

And if that happens, I guess we’ll just have to start from scratch.

About Author

Andrew Deaver is the creator of New Age Writing (http://newagewriting.com), a site that offers content writing services for websites of any shape and size.

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