Have you spent the lockdown thinking about starting your own business? You’ll have several ways of doing it. For many, you can start easily and sell on Facebook Marketplace, eBay, Gumtree, or Shpock. That’s simple enough, and, during the lockdown, that’s what our local cake shop has been doing. I can sit here at home and order some lovely sugary cakes right now, but I do have to use Facebook.
Even though it’s in the UK, all the prices appear on the Facebook page in US dollars. When you click on some of the “shop” links, they don’t work and send you to dead pages on the cake website.
Your other option is to use a “buy and sell” app, which again – although great – isn’t always ideal. Why? You don’t have full control over the experience, and there’s another logo all over your store. You still can’t always add those little extra features, like wanting to add the name of a loved one onto a cake.
So, as you grow, you’re going to want to look at creating a website. It’s something that many people will shy away from. There’s a name to choose, a security certificate to sort, and a website to design. You absolute must have a security certificate for your website now, and the work involved seems quite scary.
Now, I’ve been doing this smartphone coverage for a long while. During all this time, I’ve done all the websites, the hosting, and the back-end. What I can tell you that, with the aid of apps like WordPress and an e-commerce solution like Ecwid, it’s now easier than ever to create a website with a proper storefront and shopping cart. It’s much easier now than it was a few years ago. WordPress themes will ensure that you have a dynamic mobile website that adapts to the various screen sizes and dimensions of phones. It is important when your potential customers are browsing.
All of this used to be difficult, and actually, I started by using Microsoft Frontpage back in the day. Looking back, it was terrible. However, at the time it was what you used to design a site, then you designed another place for those “newbies” who were browsing the site on the phone.
The whole domain name and security thing are also taken out of your hands because your web host will usually sort out for you. All you have to concentrate on is choosing a template that matches your store, product, or service. That’s just a matter of choosing a theme for your WordPress site (which again, your web hosting provider will probably sort out) and making a logo. The process now is easy and straightforward, meaning that all you’ll need to do is add your products to your store.
The result is your own website, your own brand, your own place on the web to call “home.” Somewhere where all those social media connections can fire to and something that you can control entirely