Category: Recipes

Recipes, Technology

Recipe: Low Cost Web Presence

Today I am going to provide two solutions for creating your own web presence that will keep your operating costs to a minimum and won’t require you to have any servers located at your business. These solutions won’t be perfect for everyone but might work very well for small and medium sized businesses that don’t need some advanced web site features like e-commerce or dynamic content.

 

 Simple Site

 

My hmbconsulting.ca web site is an example of what I am calling Simple Site.

Ingredients

  1. A custom domain (ie. mycompany.com)
  2. WordPress

Directions

  1. Go to godaddy.com, create an account and register your own custom domain.
  2. Go to wordpress.com, create an account and then Register a New Blog.

Costs

  1. Go Daddy charges $11.77 US per year for a .com domain and $12.75 US per year for a .ca domain. Other options are available on godaddy.com
  2. WordPress charges $12 US per year for Domain Mapping so that your custom domain maps to your WordPress blog

Fancy Site

 

 

The Markham Stouffville Hospital Foundation web site www.gala.mshf.on.ca is an example of what I am calling a Fancey Site. Using Showit you can create a web site that will allow you to integrate text, pictures and video content. The Showit service uses Flash to enable animation such as transitions, embed photos and video on your web pages. You can also detect mobile clients such as iPhones and iPads so that you can automatically switch to a HMTL5 version of your web site so that it can be properly display on your mobile phone or any other device that does not support Adobe Flash.

Note: The Showitfast service was built for photographers so that they could create web sites to showcase their work. Generally, photographers don’t want to spend too much time building their web site, so the interface is simple to use and many templates exist so that they can quickly get content onto their web sites. You don’t need to be a photographer to leverage the capabilities of Showit though. Many other companies can take advantage of the multimedia capabilities of Showit promote their products or services.

Ingredients

  1. A custom domain (ie. mycompany.com)
  2. Showit subscription

Directions

  1. Go to godaddy.com, create an account and register your own custom domain.
  2. Go to showitfast.com, download and install the Showit client.
  3. Launch the Showit client and then create an account.
  4. Sign up for a subscription.
  5. Choose a style for your site from one of the templates or create your own site from scratch.
  6. Add your content to the site.
  7. Publish your site.

Costs

  1. Go Daddy charges $11.77 US per year for a .com domain and $12.75 US per year for a .ca domain. Other options are available on godaddy.com
  2. Showitfast charges $429 per year for 10GB of storage and the web hosting.

There are many other services available that will let you create your web presence and keep it updated while minimizing your ongoing costs.

Recipes

The Cloud Based Company – Part 1

Over the last while I have been looking for solutions that will allow me to be more efficient, keep data off my computers, and create more complete business infrastructure. I am a small business owner and I have to look after everything myself so I always need to find ways to save myself time and effort.

Well, I don’t look after everything myself. I think I have the best accountant on the planet and he is worth every penny. He and his staff look after my books, make sense of my receipts and tells me where to sign. Other than this, I have to worry about managing my clients, find new clients, track my time, create invoices, collect payments, etc.

Until a few weeks ago I had been using a collection of spreadsheets to track my time, create invoices, and track payments. I had been listening to one of my favourite photography podcasts ( thisweekinphoto.com) when an ad for one of their sponsors caught my attention. They described Freshbooks.com as a simple and fast way to handle creating invoices. I went to the Freshbooks.com web site, signed up for a free account and was hooked immediately. I then spent the next day switching all of my time tracking and invoice management over to Freshbooks.com.

Why? Simple. I now have my own web portal with my company logo that allows me to track my time, create invoices, send invoice notifications to my clients and track payments. I can even provide my clients access to this web portal so that they can see how I spend my time, see the invoices that I have sent them and see when I have received their payment. As an added bonus I also have an iPhone application that I can use to perform many of the same time tracking and invoice management activities. I can do this at any time from anywhere.

More importantly, to me anyway, the Freshbooks.com service is now a big piece of my overall Cloud Based Company strategy.