WIX web builder ...

signs · 19 Jan 2018 at 10:12

I'm a complete noob when it comes to PC's (so please be kind

)

Quick whats happening ,

I've had a website (sign business) for some 17 years now made by a friend , then a few years back we moved to Yell.com , they built a new site for us telling us they had hid our old site under their new one because we had good history with GOOGLE ? (we still pay Host for u £50 a year to host our emails and domain name ..i think :rolleyes:

)

Basically i want to move from Yell.com as its not bringing much work in (and i feel its quite expensive )

so we have started to build our own site using WIX builder

1, are wix the best

2, should i get Wix to host the site and move away from host 4 u

3. i want to keep my domain name , do i need to keep paying host 4 u for this ?

4 , is google history important ?

thanks , hope this all make sense , and look forward to your reply's

Rob

Hyburnate · 19 Jan 2018 at 11:59

1, are wix the best
no

2, should i get Wix to host the site and move away from host 4 u
no

3. i want to keep my domain name , do i need to keep paying host 4 u for this ?
depends

4 , is google history important ?
yes, kind of

Is this business the main source of your income? Does it have a healthy turnover? If yes, invest in an expert, not Wix.

SEO is important, as is a fast and reliable website. Wix will not offer you great SEO and you will have limitations of their system.

e; what's your website address?

signs · 19 Jan 2018 at 12:39

@Hyburnate n

hi , thanks for the reply

Yes its the main business (we are in our 18th year now )

i think WIX offer something like 5 SEO words per page and i believe they have a optimizer once the site is up and running ?

I'm guessing we only get 2 calls a month from yell , so anything must be better. right ?

i know its "how long is a piece of string" but whats the average build cost for a small company website ?

touch · 19 Jan 2018 at 12:59

signs said:
(we still pay Host for u £50 a year to host our emails and domain name ..i think )

signs said:
whats the average build cost for a small company website ?

TBH, if you're not happy paying £50 a year for email and domain hosting then a custom built site probably isn't for you.
A basic, cheap site will be in the region of £500 and you can go up from there to pretty much any number you could think of. You'd probably want to be looking in the 1500-3000 ish range to get somebody who knows what they are doing.

It's probably a bit of a catch-22 situation: if you dont get much custom through your site at the moment, you'll be reluctant to spend money on it but if it don't spend money on it you'll never get a lot of custom through it.

Vanquish-Storm · 19 Jan 2018 at 13:07

Do you sell product through your site or is the site a way to promote the fact your business exists?

signs · 19 Jan 2018 at 13:09

Vanquish-Storm said:
Do you sell product through your site or is the site a way to promote the fact your business exists?

no we don't sell products through our site , like you say its just to let people know who we are and what we do

signs · 19 Jan 2018 at 13:13

touch said:
TBH, if you're not happy paying £50 a year for email and domain hosting then a custom built site probably isn't for you.
A basic, cheap site will be in the region of £500 and you can go up from there to pretty much any number you could think of. You'd probably want to be looking in the 1500-3000 ish range to get somebody who knows what they are doing.

It's probably a bit of a catch-22 situation: if you dont get much custom through your site at the moment, you'll be reluctant to spend money on it but if it don't spend money on it you'll never get a lot of custom through it.

No i have no problem with £50 a year , i probably didn't explain very well , we pay yell .com £700 ish a year and we have continued to pay our original host £50 a year

edit .. yeah the catch 22 about sums it up , but i fully understand its something that needs addressing

signs · 19 Jan 2018 at 13:23

this is the Yell.com web page ..

i feel what we have done ourselves design wise is A LOT better than this !

the design side isn't an issue for us, its the rest of it that i'm lost on

Hyburnate · 19 Jan 2018 at 14:09

I need to increase my rates

Yep you can do a lot better than that, the business I work full-time for I did some SEO work and we get that many calls a day and brought in a few hundred k of work... That's pure SEO.

signs · 19 Jan 2018 at 15:11

Hyburnate said:
I need to increase my rates

Yep you can do a lot better than that, the business I work full-time for I did some SEO work and we get that many calls a day and brought in a few hundred k of work... That's pure SEO.

so what do you recommend, my business as you can see is pretty bespoke

i guess the crux is , will building this site on Wix then spending what i would give to yell.com on AD words or something else be better ?

Hyburnate · 19 Jan 2018 at 16:05

signs said:
so what do you recommend, my business as you can see is pretty bespoke

i guess the crux is , will building this site on Wix then spending what i would give to yell.com on AD words or something else be better ?

Invest it in optimising both on-page, off-page and local SEO

signs · 19 Jan 2018 at 16:14

Hyburnate said:
Invest it in optimising both on-page, off-page and local SEO

you gotta keep it simples for me , i can guess local SEO but what do you mean on page and off page ? ta

touch · 19 Jan 2018 at 16:18

signs said:
No i have no problem with £50 a year , i probably didn't explain very well , we pay yell .com £700 ish a year and we have continued to pay our original host £50 a year

The £700 to Yell is for hosting the website (and maybe some management of the site?), it seems high but depends on what's included in the package. edit: having seen the site, I dont think you get value for money from Yell hosting
The £50 to host4u is for hosting the email and domain, that's a reasonable price. You'd be able to get it a little cheaper elsewhere but probably not worth the hassle of moving it.

Your Yell website is pretty poor. You could probably do much better yourself by just using wordpress and an SEO plugin. Find a host with a one-click wordpress install and it'll do the full setup for you - very easy.
Even the WIX site you're making is likely to see an improvement in SEO over that Yell site.
The most effective route would still be to get an expert to do it for you IMO.

Hyburnate · 19 Jan 2018 at 20:02

signs said:
you gotta keep it simples for me , i can guess local SEO but what do you mean on page and off page ? ta

On-page is on-page elements, such as meta description, title tags, heading tags, content etc.

Off-page is social media sharing, link building etc

gpuerrilla · 19 Jan 2018 at 20:32

I'm sick of the YouTube ads, especially using comedians etc to pretend they have just built a site using it...

signs · 19 Jan 2018 at 20:38

Never seen one ?

signs · 19 Jan 2018 at 20:39

Hyburnate said:
On-page is on-page elements, such as meta description, title tags, heading tags, content etc.

Off-page is social media sharing, link building etc

Thanks , I’ve no idea

Hades · 19 Jan 2018 at 20:49

I don't want to sound critical. But your business is a sign making company and you seem reluctant to spend money making an online sign to attract people? What sort of message does that send people who find you?

signs · 22 Jan 2018 at 11:22

Hades said:
I don't want to sound critical. But your business is a sign making company and you seem reluctant to spend money making an online sign to attract people? What sort of message does that send people who find you?

I can see what you are saying , but if i spend anything up to a thousand i'm guessing its going to be a template ? which it what this site uses , i spoke to a guy last week who builds sites and he said around 7.5k

Dup · 22 Jan 2018 at 14:23

signs said:
I can see what you are saying , but if i spend anything up to a thousand i'm guessing its going to be a template ? which it what this site uses , i spoke to a guy last week who builds sites and he said around 7.5k

7.5k... what was included? I'd expect a complex eCommerce website and some change from that!

I worked for a small web design company for ~3 years. For a 3-5 page site with your usual features (product galleries/landing pages , homepage, contact page with form etc.) you'd expect to pay about £5-600. This would be built into a robust content management system, be mobile-friendly by default and be as Google friendly as possible when it comes to the basic SEO and coding practices including meta tags and structured data where possible. The design wouldn't be a template either. You'd be given a design proposal image and then it would be built based on that from scratch. I think any good local design agency should be able to meet that.

Any other costs should count to helping with your SEO be it with changing content for news/social media to help improve rankings to adwords campaigns. SEO is a black art and I would advise finding a local creative agency to handle all aspects if possible, but it will cost. Basic hosting of your domain and the website + email shouldn't cost more than £50-60 a year tops.