teecee

We have a salon opening in the next 30-60 days we're looking for some one to help with the design of our website. looking for something professional. there are a lot of great sites out there. Any suggestions/ideas? Who did you use? How much does a project like that usually cost?

excitednewguy

Look at palmettosoft.com

They did a real estate website for me and it looks good. If I were you, i would not spend a lot of money on one though, honestly, not many folks will be looking at your site.

Sunnytimes

You can do it yourself easy peasy using citymax.com. Even someone as dense (when it comes to programming) as me has been able to manage it.

Marca

Me too, with a little help you can do it yourself. It's a lot easier if you want to update often.

Marca

Using dreamweaver for our company website.
OsCommerce for a webshop. Very easy to handle!

Tommy

Web sites are one of those things you can spend a bundle on having someone else do it, or spend next to nothing doing it yourself.

Some tips:
1) Register your domain name (ie: www.mytanningsalon.com) yourself. If you let your web-site builder do it, you may not own or control your domain name. Pretty cheap and easy to do at www.godaddy.com, I’ve heard of problems with other registration services but not Godaddy.
2) Open your own hosting account, for the same basic reasons. If you don’t have rights to the admin the hosting account, a web-site builder could change, remove, or prevent you from additional updates of the site you’ve paid for. If you maintain the admin rights to your account, you control the access to your web-site for the web-site builders, not visa-versa. This also allows you to maintain off-host backups of the web-site you’ve paid for. www.godaddy.com also offers a range of hosting plans, Windows/ASP and Linux/PHP hosts are both available.
3) Start with a strategy, as with any endeavor in my opinion, the best starting place is the ending place, what are your goals? Are you going to attract new customers and how? The web is a huge place, finding one web-site among billions of web-sites is an issue, you know about google, MSN, and other search motors, but don’t forget local directories and co-advertising with other health and beauty businesses, make sure you add your domain name to all your promotional literature. Word of mouth is the best advertising in my opinion. Are you going to service exiting customers and how? If there isn’t a reason for people to view your web-site, they won’t.
4) Make sure you own the Copyright to your site. It’s OK for a web-site builder to claim Copyright of your site until you pay them for the work they did in building it. If you choose to hire a web-site builder, and they employ this method of payment guarantee, make sure you get a transfer of Copyright ownership in writing when you make final payment or there will be a legal question of ownership of the work you paid for.
5) Design a site plan before you talk to programmers. Site plans are your goals, and in general, can be used for site navigation, example:
Home. (what is the first impression you want the viewer to see.)
Specials. (incentives to bring new customers in or existing customers back.)
Services. (what you offer)
Pricing. (what they pay, if you don’t publish your prices, they wonder why.)
Picture. (show off, let the customer be comfortable with salon and staff before they come in)
Location. (give new customer driving directions and map)
Contact. (phone numbers, email, encouraging communications)
Site plans have two major benefits, first they are a big part of your overall strategy, second they give you or your web-site builder guidance on what to build. If you don’t have a site plan you can “wonder aimlessly” building your own web-site or your web-site builder can run the bill up by adding stuff you don’t want, need or ask for.
6) Don’t spend a pile of money on a web-site to begin with and let your customers dictate the growth of your site. If you spend $1000’s on a web-site how many new customers are you going to attract and how many tans do you have to sell to return that investment?
7) KISS Keep It Simple Stupid. The most used web-site on the web is Google and there is nothing fancy there, simple, easy to navigate, and to the point.
8) Avoid “Flash” it increases cost and load times and requires user to download ad-ins which some user won’t do for security reasons. Avoid “Flash” it increases load times which customers may not tolerate, it is “closed-source” which means you may not own the source code (you better get that in writing up-front) to the web site you paid for and this may lock you into the web-site builder who created and it permits web-site builder to run any code they from your customer’s system.

I have a very simple tanning salon template I built for someone on one of these boards, if your interested, let me know and I'll see if I can find it.
Good Luck.

Tom

teecee

Thanks for the great info Tom. I'd love to see that template if you can find it. I want a website because I'm an avid googler. If I'm looking for a hair salon, theater, restaurant, ect. I'll google. So I figure I'm not the only one with this habit. I do want to keep it simple. Pictures of beds, the salon, beautiful people with tans, specials, and packages.

From the sounds of it, I should do this on my own.

Steve Underhill

Go to www.WaveService.com
405-226-5051

mr belvedere

I liked my experience and product with www.register.com. Good luck

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applehat

lol =P