Introduction

Whether you are a content creator or product manufacturer, you know you need to have a presence on the digital landscape where your business or identity resides. This is where people can find you to interact or purchase items. But websites are a bit of work. It is so much easier to have a Facebook page, YouTube account, or what ever social media platform you enjoy. There are many options out there for creating a digital home. Today I will review your options and I will make the case for why a website should be in your plans to begin with or, at least, within the short term.

This is Bill Strand and you are listening to the Reptile Entrepreneur Podcast where we build responsible and successful businesses in the reptile community.

What are the options for a digital presence?

A website is not the only option for having a digital homebase. Mainly, because websites aren’t that simple and take effort to maintain. And when there is a problem, you can kiss a day of productivity away as you search for what broke. So a whole host of options have sprung up from free and simple where you can throw something together in a morning – which will be basic, but effective – to a full fledged website which can rise in complexity to match however much money and staff you can throw at it. But, let’s narrow our discussion to options for a one person entrepreneur just trying to get something up and running so they can get to the 50 other things they have to do in the day.

Your first, and easiest option is to actually bypass the website and create a profile on the Social Media of your choice. Of the major names, Facebook is the easiest to create a business profile that has the basic information and allows you to interact with your customer base. You could set up a Facebook business page on a Saturday morning and be contacting your audience Saturday afternoon.  Some people have just a Facebook business page and that is it. Facebook has a serious complication for us in that it is hostile towards anything to do with sales of animals. So, if you are a breeder, Facebook is not the place for you. In fact, when Facebook clamped down on this a couple years ago, it wiped many breeders off the map whose only presence was Facebook. But it is very easy to put up a Facebook business page and give the appearance of being a real business. Other people do their business off Instagram or Pinterest. The key is finding where your customer base is.

Another option is to make a business account on a storefront platform such as Amazon and Etsy. You can use social media as your marketing and outreach and send them to your Amazon or Etsy store. And there is a huge advantage in using these platforms. Someone else is taking care of making sure they run smoothly. When my website has a problem, I wipe off my calendar and spend hours figuring out which plugin is not updated and is now interfering with another plug-in. Or what is going wrong with the server that makes me stay on hold for 30 to 45 minutes to speak to tech support. Because it always seems to go down during the busiest part of the day. Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Pinterest, Amazon, Etsy…these are not going down. And if they do, it is not your problem. There will be instant mobilization of the greatest tech minds in Silicone Valley to get the platform back up and running.

So, why don’t we all just go that route? Well, there is a price to be paid and freedom to be given up. Whenever you use someone else’s platform you have to live under their rules which can change at any moment. As all the breeders found out when Facebook decided that they would remove anyone suspected or accused of selling animals. Even now, Facebook animal groups can disappear in the middle of the night without explanation or recourse. I worked with a general reptile group with 30K+ members that literally disappeared with no explanation. There was no animal sales allowed so the reason for this is unknown. People have been able to appeal their page being taken down, but it is very much a guilty and executed until proven innocent. Does this not affect you? Well, not now. With PETA buying Facebook stock who knows how far it will go officially or unofficially. With zero mandatory transparency you have no idea what is happening in the Facebook boardroom. But, you say, I am safe!  The rules specifically say that you can offer caging and pet support products! Except I bring you back to hordes of activists making accusations that Facebook acts on without asking you first. So, with all this grief, do you need to be on the world’s largest social media site? It sure doesn’t hurt your reach. But I strongly suggest, that you do not use a social media platform as your primary business hub. No problem, I use Instagram! Yes, well, Instagram is owned by Facebook. All social media sites are owned by someone who is under pressure by special interest groups all the time to push their agenda. This is a huge reason why we need to grow strong as a community and support our political efforts. So what do you do when Amazon or Etsy decides they aren’t going to allow sales of pet products? Sounds ridiculous that that would ever happen? Maybe it is. But please do not think we are a mainstream community yet. We are still vulnerable. The lesson learned here is that even if you have a page or account on all these social media or ecommerce platforms, which is a great plan, you do not want to rely on them to keep your business alive. They are a marketing and sales outreach to bring people to your home base. There are three things that you own and that cannot be taken away from you by a board of directors or CEO deciding they do not agree with your life’s work. Those are a website, a podcast, and an email list. Yes, you do use a hosting provider for all of those, so it seems we are never totally safe, but hosting providers are much further down the censorship path. And, worse case scenario, you could be your own host for your website and podcast. Though, this is well into the realm of hypothetical. The chances of the politics getting that bad are slim even for my cynical mind. As long as what you are doing is legal and not causing people to do illegal things you should not have a problem with a hosting provider.

Website options

So a website should be top of the list as far as your plans to establish your business. But how do you go about doing this? Because it is complicated to navigate all the steps of creating a website, many companies have stepped up to the plate and have made website builders that mean you do not have to learn HTML coding. These options range from very controlled where you don’t have many options with which to get yourself in trouble to very open where it is pretty much the wild west and you can get into all sorts of trouble you never imagined. And with those varying levels come varying levels of effort from you in learning how to use website building tools. I am going to give an overview of website building options out there, but first I want to do a public service announcement on free things and then I will review some terms so we are on the same page. Then I will list some website builders that you can use that will help you get a website up relatively quickly.

First my public service announcement on free stuff.

The danger of free

It is tempting to look for free options. In fact, that is why free options are available. Free attracts all sorts of people. But, as someone who is working on building a business, how long do you think your doors would be open if you did things for free? There is always a catch. Always. Some catches are obvious and you form a symbiotic relationship with your free provider. If you eat a fruit off a tree for free the expectation is that you will dump the seed inside somewhere else. Fruit is the original free offering. You think plants produce fruit out of the goodness of their heart? Nope, they are just attracting seed dispersers. Free nectar? That is to get pollinators to do their job. Free website? You’ll be advertising the provider’s name in hopes that a potential paying customer will see the name. You get a free website and Weebly, for example, who is a website builder service, gets to put a billboard with their name on your website. Do you love your free Facebook and Instagram? All you have to do is give them your shopping, spending, and browsing habits and they’ll stay as unobtrusive as possible why you take constant dopamine hits off their platform. I guess we haven’t gone too far from the fruit and nectar strategy, have we. I often use the example of Donkey Island from the Pinnochio story. Kids are lured to the island and given all the candy and amusement park rides they want. They find out too late that they are slowly turning into donkeys and will be used as workers in the mines. The parallels are…well, just consider it.

Free becomes a serious thing to think about when you start looking at websites. If you get anything for “free”, and that is in big quotes, know what you are giving in return. Is it a limited time offer? Is it an introductory version to give you a taste for wanting the paid version? If you use this free item will you now be an advertiser for the company giving it to you? Was this a senior project for a student who got her degree and now won’t be supporting it? Whenever someone puts in time, effort, and money to create something they are doing it for a reason and if they are spending time, effort, and money maintaining it, they are doing it for a continued benefit. Make sure you are okay with what you are using for payment.

Personally, I make it a point to not use free things, if possible. Paying in dollars is more straight forward and more reliable as a benefit to the provider. Because if you are paying for the service by allowing advertising on your website, viewing advertising, or giving up personal data then you are merely the means to the end of finding people with dollars to give. You are more valuable as a user if you are the one giving them the dollars and that is where you get the best products and best customer service when you need it. Although I encourage and support saving as much money as possible in the beginning, be very careful and aware when you accept anything for free. It isn’t free. You may not be giving of money, but you are giving of something. Just be fully aware of how you are paying for it and make sure you are good with that. I mention this specifically now because you can find so much free software when building your website. It can get easy to fall into the trap of expecting to be able to find any plugins or services you want for free. Just take care out there.

How a website works

To navigate the website world I want to give a brief overview of how this all works as far as websites. I’ll give a statement and explain each part.

Your website has a unique name called a domain name. This is how the world finds you in the digital realm. All of your files for your website are stored on a hosting server. This is a physical bank of memory chips that is accessible by computers on the internet.  You build all those file, which are the structure of your website, using a Content Management System software or Web Builder. Clear? Yeah, probably not. So I am going to explain each one of these, but only as much as you need to start on your first website. I have been making websites for decades and I am still learning so much. But I know I can definitely get you up and running so that will be my job over these next many months.

So, let’s dive down just a little bit more.

Domain Name

Your website needs a domain name. This is what you type in the browser to tell it where to go. My domain name here is reptileentrepreneur.com. I got this name by going to a domain registrar, in this case, Bluehost.com and typed it in to see if it was taken. It was open because the world has been just waiting for me to do this, and I reserved it. Now the name is mine and I can host the website it points to anywhere I want to. Of course, it makes sense to host it where I reserved it, but you are free to take it anywhere.

Hosting Server

Now that you have a name you need a place to store all of the computer files that will make up your website. This is the text, the images, the charts, and everything else that will be part of your website. Technically, you could store them all, or “host” them, on your home computer. The problem is that your internet provider may not be set up to handle all the traffic your soon-to-be wildly successful website will require. And, the more image you have the more space your website takes and the more traffic you will have to handle. The vast majority of website owners hire a company that has huge memory and internet traffic capacity to host their website files so you don’t have to worry about it. For example, Reptileentrepreneur.com is hosted at Bluehost. Chameleonacademy.com is hosted at another provider, GoDaddy. Different hosts offer different services. But, for Reptileentrepreneur, my hosting service, Bluehost stores all of my files and handles all of the internet traffic requesting to see the website.

CMS

Now, I need someway of designing and updating my website. I could code it using HTML which is a computer language. You are all yelling NO! and I agree. Do not spend your time learning HTML. There are Content Management Systems like WordPress and web builder sites like Wix or Weebly, squarespace, or Shopify that will give you the ability to intuitively design a website. Even Bluehost and GoDaddy have their own web builders to make it easy. I have spent the last decade working in WordPress so I know that best. WordPress gives you enormous freedom to build your site, but it also has a bit of a learning curve. The other web builder services reduce your options, but make it much easier to get up and running quickly.  There are pros and cons to each way, but if you are just starting out there is nothing wrong with making it easy and working with Weebly, Wix, or Squarespace. Shopify is a little more complicated, but is an incredibly powerful ecommerce platform. And the WordPress is the system I love to hate. WordPress is used to design and create 64% of all websites. So it is, by far, the most used Content Management System to build websites. Shopify is a close second at around 5%. WordPress allows you to do so much, but has so many moving parts that it requires a little effort to learn and when something goes wrong it is a challenge to trouble shoot. But, and here is a huge consideration, 100s of millions of web designers are in the same boat and so it is amazing how easy it is to find answers to your questions on YouTube. It is like the global community came together and created a crowd sourced manual. I am quite impressed with how good YouTube is for learning and troubleshooting WordPress.

Building a website will be a regular discussion topic here on the podcast. Not only will I be sharing the steps on how to put this all together, I’ll share when things go wrong. Honestly, knowing how to fix things when they don’t behave as expected is half the battle! I know it can be intimidating figuring out how to get a web presence. And, yes, there are a lot of odds and ends to sort through.

If you have been debating getting started then your assignment this week will be to think about a domain name. If you have one already or figure one out then visit the show notes for episode 2. I will have a tutorial with links and step by step instructions as to how to reserve your domain name. I’ll go a bit further and also suggest a hosting plan that you can get at the same time if you are up for going the WordPress route. You’ll be getting a little bit ahead of the curve here so I will also suggest some good wordpress learning videos that can help you get a taste for web design. I have to admit, I love working with WordPress and putting together websites. Building websites is a lot of fun. Anyway, check out the show notes for episode 2 if you are ready to take the next step. I’ll get you set up on the same hosting platform as I am on.  

Next week we will be talking about 3D printing for our interview. We are going to be getting into a regular schedule of an industry interview on Monday and a personal view point, product comparison, or whatever I am in the middle of on Thursday. So Monday is all business. The Thursday episode is whatever is on my mind!

That is enough to think about today. Please do me the favor of leaving a review on your podcast provider so other people know this is a good place to be. And share this episode with someone that could benefit from having a website.

Thank you for joining me here! We are gaining momentum here and I am excited for where we are headed!