What we learned about starting a Web site could fill a book ... or at least an article or two.
It all started simply enough with just a conversation over dinner. My step-daughter, Megahn, had a few pieces of jewelry given to her by ex-boyfriends, as well as a wedding set from a brief marriage (oops) that were collecting dust in her jewelry drawer. She didn’t feel right about wearing them anymore—it’s not like you wear your old engagement ring out on a date on a Friday night. She was in a new relationship and felt ready to move some of these reminders of relationships past out the door. But what to do with them? Pawn shops are ... icky. Commission stores want a big percentage and you have to agree to leave your items with them for months on end with no promise of a sale. Ebay? Not a bad idea, but you are just one post among thousands with no way of making your item different from the rest.
That’s when the thought came to us—wouldn’t it be fun if there was a site where you could sell jewelry given to you by an ex and blog about the break up? And then we did something we’d never done before—we decided to act on what we thought was a good idea and the result is called: ExBoyfriendJewelry.com.
Ex-boyfriend jewelry—we just liked the sound of it. We didn’t really consider the fact people would take the name very literally. We spent months explaining that, yes, jewelry from an ex-husband is welcome, or from an ex-girlfriend or a same sex ex. We just thought it had a good ring to it. A catchy name is important, but we didn’t consider who it left out. Live and learn.
And did it occur to us to purchase all those Web site names similar to ours? Or spelled wrong? Nope. Surely we spent the $9 to buy exhusbandjewelry.com? Uh ... that would be a no. And the moment we got some press, someone else snapped up all those names we should have bought, bad spelling and all. We were just two ladies with an idea and zero experience designing, building, or launching a Web site. So where to begin?
We did a lot of web surfing, looking at sites—how they were set up, how they worked, what we liked, what we didn’t like. Then we compiled an extensive wish list of functionality and lots of design reference. And then we asked everyone we know if they know someone who designs Web sites. It’s amazing—everyone knows someone who designs Web sites. Okay, everyone under twenty-five knows someone who designs Web sites.
So we started having meetings, we picked a designer, launched a Web site, were completely unprepared for the response, and desperately tried to learn from our mistakes as we stumbled forward.
Tips for picking a Web site designer:
- Get estimates from at least three designers, more if you can handle repeating yourself that many times.
- Ask for links to completed sites they’ve designed and speak to the site owners.
- Find out if the designer does this full time or if, say, they just do this to pay the bills between acting and directing gigs and have a big project that might get green lit right about the time your Web site gets national attention and they become completely unavailable to you when you desperately need them, since your site keeps crashing because your hosting service can’t handle that kind of traffic! Hypothetically speaking.
- Make a point of educating yourself about things like bandwidth and traffic loads. Who knew?
- Get your estimates all together and then go to the most expensive designer and ask if he’ll match the mid-range estimate. They might just say yes and save you a lot of hassle when you come back to them to clean up the cheaper guy’s mess.
