Tags
crowd sourcing, entrepreneur, logo design, mumtrepreneur, photos, product photography, squarespace, website building, website design, working in coffee shops
So today is all about websites and logos. Not the most scintillating for my friends and family readers so please do feel free to drop off now if this is going to bore you to death!
The simple fact is that now I have product I need to find a way to sell it. The way I see it there are 3 big things I need to initially achieve here:
Photos – Firstly all of the advice I read says to get great photos. My husband is a bit of a budding photographer and owns a serious amount of camera kit so I am planning to order him some professional backgrounds and see how he goes. All the advice recommends very strongly against this approach stating that if you sell on-line your photos are your shop window and it is all around having them taken well so that people love the look of them and start adding them to their Pinterest boards etc. Whilst I understand this advice and recognise the value of it I am quite keen to stop shelling out cash on a daily basis so I have decided to take the budget option and see how it goes. I will report back…
A logo – in order to start building a presence of some kind I really need to get myself a logo. I have settled on a name ‘Cheeky Elephant’ (don’t ask how we ended up here – suffice to say it is cute and quirky and not already secured by someone else which frankly is a pretty rare set of attributes I have come to find!). Having spoken to a couple of very clever social media type friends I have decided to explore the world of crowd sourcing to develop my design. This is a fascinating process, so much so I have decided to dedicated my entire next blog to it (what a cliff hanger!!). Anyway as soon as I have the results and can talk knowledgeably on how successful it actually is I will let you know.
A website – this is a really tricky one and to be honest not something I have totally ironed out yet. There are 2 main routes to getting an e-commerce website that I can find. Firstly, commission someone to design one for you (this is circa £3500 for a vaguely decent e-commerce site with a year’s hosting. You then pay a monthly fee for hosting in the future). As mentioned in a previous blog, finding the right person is by no means straightforward and it pays to do your research (there are a lot of rubbish people out there with fab looking portfolios and a lot of chat and very little else!). I have however had some great recommendations so if I can come to terms with spending the price of a very nice holiday on something so dull I am probably all set.
The other option (again thanks to my very clever friend (check out said clever friend at http://maxzografos.com/) is to utilise one of a growing number of template driven web design companies. On Max’s advice I have been looking into Squarespace who, for a very reasonable sum, will allow you to use one of their very professional templates to effectively create a website through dragging and dropping. Suspect this will not be as easy as it sounds but I am very tempted to give it a go (nothing ventured, nothing gained and all that) I will either post a link to my gleaming new website or you will find I have gone very quiet due to having taken a sledge hammer to my laptop in frustration whilst trying!
That’s pretty much it for today guys. Only other achievement has been my first attempt at creating a virtual office. Having decided that staying another day in the house all alone from 8 – 5 would drive me completely crazy I have made it to my fav local café where I have been ensconced drinking coffee and maxing their wifi in happy peace (i.e. without 2 small people crawling on me, wiping snot on me and knocking my coffee over!) for the past 2 hours – it has quite frankly been bliss (sorry long suffering, and poorer by the minute, husband(!) we may have to build an extra line item into our financials for my ‘new coffee shop while working’ habit.
entrepreneurmum 
Would you like your talented nephew (designed 3 logos to date and being used) to give Cheeky Elephant a go……. and only charge in love. Also a theme that I use for one of my websites is http://themeforest.net/item/udesign-wordpress-theme/253220 basically drag and drop, reasonably priced and I had fun creating my site. It can be moulded anyway you like, hence U-Design. My main website is HTML where I had the background built and I input content as I please. That cost me $2K but well worth it, plus it does not cost for me to update. I use Business Catalyst which is now owned by Adobe but only $22 a month. Obviously I don’t have an E-Commerce site, but has great capabilities including e-commerce.
Thanks Andrea – thats really useful. I would love my wonderful and uber talented nephew to have a go for me. Tell him the one I really like is http://www.loveitloveitloveit.co.uk so I am hoping for something with that kind of look and feel. Big hugs to all of the ozzy crew
xxx
Awesome, will see what he comes up with. I said that I had put him forward and he was busting to go.
Have a look at shopify. Shopify.com Its an ecommerce system where you just add in the content. They have loads of themes and much cheaper than getting a site built from scratch. They woud be my first choice if you want something at low cost but cost effective.
Thank you – I will check them out now!