After you have a good idea where people are being scared off you can then change that page to see if you increase the hits to the next page, kind of like changing the bait.  After some time of monitoring your funnel you will understand how to get the max amount of people getting to that check out page.  As always though the less pages it takes for a customer to get to the checkout from the home page the better.  You have to remember though sometimes the fish can get smart and you may need to change the bait every so often to stay competitive.  Play around with different things on your shopping cart page, try and reduce the amount of clicks till a product is being shipped to the client!

Any way those are my thoughts for this afternoon.

Hosting your website is a lot simpler than people think.

Many web design companies try to lock you down to their hosting service saying that it’s impossible to host with anyone else.  Well the news is that this is just not true.

When getting your website built by a company one of the first things you should ask is “Am I tied down to hosting with you?”   If the answer is yes, you should move on because no matter how good they seem to be they will try and screw you here. It’s in their interests to derive additional passive income from the project, which is business, but this should not be to the detriment of your web design venture and the success of your business.

Now the way they will screw you ain’t as simple as jacking up the prices on you (which most likely won’t happen),  It’s all about the ongoing support.  The reason you can only host with them is because they are  likely to be using a proprietary and possibly dated program which no longer keeps up with current software in building.  This means that for another company to  pick up the website and to be able to edit it easily and freely would be next to impossible!

As time goes on website design is becoming pretty standardised so that everyone can understand and edit easily with little training. Hey, that’s exactly the way it should be right!

You wouldn’t expect to gave to pay someone to train you how to use your new smart phone, that you  just invested $$$ in!!!!

So don’t get sucked in no matter how good a deal may be because they will charge you more than you think for simple edits after the website is finished from their point of view.

Below is a section of a story that highlights this problem.

“I had my website built by a company that at this stage will remain unnamed.  When they said the website was completed I sent in my final bill and started hosting,  after a day or two of the website being live I started to notice little things that were unfinished such as the shipping sheet only had a couple of areas making it impossible for me to make any shipping without getting in contact with the customer and asking for more details.  Over the next week more and more stuff started to pop up so I went back to my designer and asked them to finish the website starting with shipping sheet, they said yea sure!’  The next day I received a bill for 180 dollars…  After I refused to pay arguments started to arise so I decided to change my hosting, but apparently I couldn’t do this because the website technically belonged to them and I was doomed to host with forever paying $80 per hour for any little change with no option for outsourcing.   Any way it’s been two months and I’m getting the website completely rebuilt at another company that don’t over charge for pricing and that I can host any where I please”.

John”

So, our point – make sure you hold back on the excitement that is always part and parcel of the web design process and ensure that you can see a clear outcome in terms of delivery from your web designer AND that it will be a site that is portable