[TPIAP] Show #14 – How To Start A Faux Painting Website – Step 1
Posted by THAT Painter Lady in Podcast
Patricia Hansen of Carolina Custom Interiors… the newest faux painter in the North Carolina area, has begun learning how to set up her new website.
She knows that this will be a great marketing tool. Showcasing her work online will allow her to share her talents and ideas with many more potential clients. By displaying her website and email addresses on all her marketing materials, she has expanded the 'net' for attracting new clients.
The cost for setting up a new web site? Good hosting plans with plenty of room for expansion and a ton of tools, should only cost about $7 -$8 per month. This is an inexpensive use of limited start-up business funds.
The hosting services Patricia decided to use is LunarPages.com LunarPages has a 1 month guarantee, so if you're not happy you can cancel and get your money back! What have you got to loose?
For more helpful tips for choosing website hosting click: Web Hosting Tips
This podcast/call is an actual conversation Patricia and I had while I am instructing her during her LunarPages.com set-up, which included all the little tidbits of information you must enter while signing up for website hosting.
The website does not show up instantly… as we haven't uploaded any files yet, so Patricia and I moved on to the discussion of web design and web software and templates for web sites.
I helped Patricia review several different websites, and we discussed what she liked and didn't like about each one. I tutored her on the faults as well as the great ideas we could find on each web site. This bit of research is necessary when beginning to design a new website… you must always have a plan, even if it is bare bones, before starting any project.
The format for Carolina Custom Interiors website will be a Wordpress blog, installed on a server at LunarPages.com using Fantastico.
You can find the WordPress Software to install at WordPress.org
Never use a free hosting service for hosting a website such as blogger or Wordpress.com:
- You do not have any customer service
- You do not have any control if your website is canceled for unknown reasons.
- You're website name will never look professional.
The WordPress "software" is easy to install at LunarPages. I hit the highlights in the podcast.
The websites we visited and discussed:
Some websites we visited after the call. These are the sites Patricia found interesting:
http://www.jenniferrebeccadesigns.com/
http://www.artisansbythesea.com/
http://www.roomerhasit.com/index.asp
http://www.paintinthetown.com/portfolio.htm
Theme sites we visited:
Follow the progress of website installation and design by visiting
www.CarolinaCustomInteriors.com
My copy of this book has cornered pages, notes and post-its on so many pages it really needs to be replaced. I love how easy it was to learn to use Wordpress and all the options it gives when setting up your new website.
Click on the Blue Arrow to play or the tiny orange mp3 logo to download.
[TPIAP] Show #14 - How To Start A Website using Wordpress [36:38m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download
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I checked out her new website and it looks great! I know from experience how hard it is to come up with a good looking website, and all the work that goes into it. So I just wanted to say it looks great!!
[...] I have done several radio show style interviews about website design for faux painters or mural artists. The information is very generic and would be helpful for anyone thinking about designing a craft website. Craft Business Website Design. [...]
The next best thing you can do is to check out all the handy plugins for WordPress like Akistmet which automatically filters spam comments for you. Just Google: wordpress plugins, or best wordpress plugins to get started. I use about 20.
looks like the site is going to be commercial and product driven for that I suggest using typepad, you have to pay for it, but it gives you way more control over your blog.
Mission Renaissance
The website looks great. We have an art related website too. In regards to getting traffic I would suggest taking lots of video and pictures of your work and submitting them to youtube, digg, stumbleupon, and all the other social media networks out there. Currently that is where 50% of 20,000 visitors a week come from!
Good luck!
Yeah, I think using free hosting like wordpress or blogspot only good for beginner or learning. If someone want to be serious in blogging, they must use paid hosting. Besides, there are so many host offering cheap price.
Well done for helping a new startup with inexpensive solutions like Lunar and WP… so many web designers charge an arm and a leg and suggest things that are just right out of the ballpark for a new business person.
Wordpress is definitely the right choice for a site like this
Patricia,
Would you mind telling us if you have used any 3rd party plugins for WP and your experinces with them ? Good, bad the ugly ?
Wordpress hosted by wordpress is very unprofessional, although hosting wordpress yourself on your own host is great. From the custom themes, plugins, and everything else! It’s a fantastic CMS system….
I agree with Artist Easel, Wordpress is def. the way to go for a site like that. Wordpress is such a versital tool and is always being updated. I have seen awesome business website setup on WP and nobody is the wiser.
I agree with the general consensus here about Wordpress. It’s a great platform to build a site on for someone who is just starting out. Both simple enough to quickly get the hang of using and robust enough to give you the ability to transform your site into just about anything that you want later on.
Wordpress is my choise and I can recommend hostgator with a wordpress blog hosting. Use GoDaddy for a domain registration and you never have to worry a thing. You should try blogger or wordpress before you make a purchase because then you what you can and can’t do with free blogs. That is the way I have used them.
The website is absorbing! And the wordpress suits like nothing else!
Great job
I totally agree with Baby Sam. I started out with Blogger but then moved over to wordpress because it was a lot more customizable.
I agree with the general consensus here about Wordpress.it a real platform for all of us ….guys! check
Wordpress on your own site is great because if you use good keyword titles the seo benefits are good. This combined with the blog pinging system all helps greatly in getting your content found. We use a wordpress blog in a subdirectory of our main site at MyCraftBiz.com and it not only provides a lot of free craft planning info for people, it then allows people to click through to our regular website with all the benefits that a normal website has re layouts etc that a blog does not have.
Wordpress on your own paid hosting can work well and as mentioned above godaddy has worked for us for years now.