Most of my stuffs sell locally on craigslist. I want people from out of state to find my website. I would love to have a lot of hits. The more hits I get, the more likely I'll have a customer.
yes - you'll need a professional webmaster/web developer/etc. to do SEO (search engine optimization) so that your website will appear in first page of google page if a customer is looking for your site.
you'll have to pay for that kind of service but it's not that expensive.
I want people to be interested in checking my website for new inventories. I want to be able to add new inventories maybe 3 or 4 times a week.
that's why it's very important to think and plan very carefully. your website has to be very functional and easy to use... as well as good design. do not focus too much on making your site looks very pretty and awesome.
there are tons of websites that look very awesome.... but the functionality is crap! nobody will come back. keep your site simple, functional, and cool and customers will keep coming back! but it's also very important to keep your site always updated with new information/products/etc. otherwise customers will have no reason to come back if there's nothing going on.
look at craigslist. a very very simple site with no design or pictures and yet.... it's extremely popular. people are always coming back to craigslist because there's always new stuff to check. a very functional, simple site is the best..... and profitable.
but this is what web developer should knows. a very good web developer is aware of this and will design your site based on your needs. biggest problem is that a client is very stubborn and keeps telling web developer what to do and what he wants. that's not good. you need to trust a professional to do his job and you have to keep an open-minded because he's a professional and he knows what he's doing. after all..... you are the one who hired him so that means you must have trusted him enough to do the job. so tell him exactly what you want and he will make your dream comes true.
it is bit hard to find a good web developer because that kind of professional is usually very expensive but hopefully - there is a professional out there who is willing to share his time and skill to help people with small businesses.
I want to be able to add/subtract inventories from Android mobile phone.
yea you can do that. your site will have to be optimized for mobile use.
I've had someone suggest that I take credit card over website. I would like to do that.
you can do that with Paypal service. Paypal is now offering a card reader service -
https://www.paypal.com/webapps/mpp/credit-card-reader but you'll need iphone for it. I don't know if there's a card reader device for android.
I'll need a real business name to have a site professionally run. How do I know no one else is using it?
you can go to
Domain Names | The World's Largest Domain Name Registrar - Go Daddy and type in a domain name to check if it's taken or not.
I'm not exactly tech savvy. The easiest thing is to have site running for me. Not sure of price. Would have to dig into that.
you can try bartering. many many ways to do this - one-time payment for whole thing (half now, half later). or pay him $$ and maybe 1 year of a small percentage of your profit for each bike sold. or offer to give him a couple of nice bikes. many ways. you can figure it out because you're creative.
best to find a local web programmer who loves riding bicycle.
So basically, I would like a website developed for me. I would probably want design changed maybe every 3 or 4 months to keep people excited. Maybe change cover picture every 3 or 4 months.
well don't do that. constantly changing design every 3-4 months is a sign that your website isn't working well. it would confuse or frustrate your returning customers because everything's all different now especially the location of links.
a famous philosophy from a well-known web consultant Steve Krug - "Dont make me think." I attended his conference in Dallas. Excellent info.
for example - look at #1 search site... Google. Same design for basically over 10 years and it's still kicking bing's ass, yahoo, etc. it's ok to change the pictures, coloring, and some small things but you should try your best to minimize how often you change such as location of links and the core functionality because customers have already learned how to use your site and they want to do it quickly without thinking... and then all of sudden, you changed your web design and your customers have to learn it again. how frustrating is that?
that's why home depot, walmart, target, etc. have similar/same layout so that people know where to go to buy something quickly at any location.
however - one exception. it's ok to change the location of your links or improve your core function based on web analysis. for example - if you look at walgreen website. there's a lot of things in it. a web consultant company did some study and found that a majority of customers go to walgreen for only 3 things - store locators, prescriptions, and photo printing. those 3 things represent 60% of traffic.... and yet those 3 important links represent only 5% of the website space. no one cares about rest of the stuff.
that's why amazon is always changing its design and yet.... nobody is still clicking on these links or paying attention to it. you know what's the first thing that customers do? they go straight to search bar and type in whatever they're looking for.
What I'll be doing almost every day is adding inventories. I figure that if items sell, then they'll be automatically deleted, right?
yes you can do that.
