Category: Internet

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Make A Website For Your New Small Business

Recently find yourself unemployed and starting a new business? Setting up a website for your doesn’t have to be overly complicated or expensive. As a technology consultant, I often help business owners navigate their options, and I’ve found that the key is matching your technical comfort level with the right approach. Let’s break down the main paths you can take.

The simplest route is using a website builder. The most popular is Squarespace. Others include Wix and Weebly. These platforms offer what-you-see-is-what-you-get (WYSIWYG) editors, which means you can drag and drop elements onto your pages without touching any code. You’ll pay a monthly fee (typically $20-35), but this includes hosting, security updates, and customer support. The trade-off? Less flexibility in terms of customization, but for many small businesses, the pre-built templates and features are more than adequate.

For those willing to invest a bit more time in exchange for greater control, hosting your own WordPress site is worth considering. WordPress powers about 40% of all websites for good reason – it’s versatile and has a massive ecosystem of themes and plugins. You’ll need to arrange your own hosting (typically $5-25 monthly) and handle updates, but you’ll have more freedom to customize your site. Many hosting providers offer “one-click” WordPress installation, making the initial setup fairly straightforward.

A middle ground that’s gaining popularity is using managed WordPress hosting from providers like Kinsta. (I personally suggest against using WP Engine since they’ve been hostile to WordPress). These services combine the flexibility of WordPress with the hands-off maintenance of website builders. While more expensive than basic hosting (starting around $30 monthly), they handle security, updates, and performance optimization for you. This option makes sense if you want WordPress’s capabilities but prefer not to deal with technical maintenance.

Remember, your choice doesn’t have to be permanent. Many businesses start with a simple website builder and migrate to a more customized solution as they grow. The most important thing is getting online with a professional-looking site that you can manage within your budget and technical abilities.

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AI Chatbots

AI chatbots are big news. People ask me what they should be doing with them. Here are my ideas to get started:

  • Search: Instead of searching Google for websites, consider using an AI chatbot.
  • Proofreading: Chatbots can offer suggestions and make changes based on grammar and content.
  • Shopping: If you have a specific need, for example for an appliance that fits in a particular set of dimensions and has particular needs, Chatbots can shortcut your research.

Keep in mind that these chatbots do “hallucinate” so always verify important information.

The key is to interact with the AI Chatbots. Don’t just ask it to write you an email. Tell it what you are trying to do and ask it to ask you questions so that it can do a better job. Then provide it feedback and tell it what kind of changes you would like.

I think of these chatbots as smart and very literal minded assistants. The more information that you can provide, the better that the assistant will be able to do what you want.

I personally like using Claude, but I also use ChatGPT. Deepmind (the new chatbot from China) is also highly regarded. Give them a try and see how they fit into your life.

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Fastmail

People often ask me what the best and cheapest way is to set up a custom domain email, not just your standard free google.com email. You can of course pay Google, but I’m not a big fan of their interface or snooping on your email to better advertise to you.

I personally use Fastmail. It’s professional, fast, reliable, and has a nice web interface. If you’re interested, my referral code for 10% off your first year is here:

https://ref.fm/u28299296

There used to be a few decent free options, but as Google has started charging, so have the others.

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VisualPing.io

Do you ever need to check if a website changes? I use an automated site checker for this such as visualping.io. What’s this useful for?:

  • If you’re watching a product’s availability on a site, for example to buy a hard-to-find item such as a popular game console.
  • If you need to see if data or text changes on sites for your job, for whatever information is contained on those pages; this could be for data analysis or competitive research.
  • If you have your own website and want to see if it goes down for any reason.

There are probably many more reasons to check websites. Visualping and other sites make money by having you pay if you need checks more frequently than every day. There used to be many PC-installed software tools for this purpose, but this has largely moved to the cloud, which I think makes sense for simplicity and ease of use.

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COVID Resources

There are lots of great resources on the state of COVID in general and for your community. Here are some that I frequent: