Getting Started Quickly with a Website

I think the thing that actually held me up the longest in actually really moving toward starting an online business was the lack of a website. One of my sons was taking a course in Web Design and I was going to sort of wait for that or try this or try that. I was always surfing around looking at my options. I looked at templates online but none of them really suited my purpose, plus I would have needed to know something about Web Design to use them.
I found Homestead a few times and I loved their templates, I think I got confused and thought if I wanted to sell anything at all I would have to sign up for the store option. Well that was not really so, it turned out.
Anyway, they have a free trial, so I don't know why I waited. (In fact this is the only web hosting that I found that had a free trial.) I realized that not having the website or the time to figure all that out was what was holding me up, so I got started. It's very easy to use and the tech support is very helpful. I did definitely need them at certain points, but I would just submit a question and the same day it would come back with the answer. But it's basically just drag and click.
As far as the store part, that was really easy too. Probably most of you already have a Paypal Account. Did you know you can upgrade it to a business account for free? You can start a business account free even if you don't already have a regular account. With certain add-ons you have to pay, but to be able to accept Paypal on your website or send email invoices to customers for payment there is no extra charge. You have to pay a small transaction percentage at the time someone actually purchases something, but that is standard with any merchant account. What I like about this is no monthly fees plus they have a simple option where you create your own Paypal "Add to Cart" and "Buy Now" buttons. After you create it, they give you the HTML to put into your site, which is super easy if you use Homestead's Site builder which comes with the hosting for free. You basically drag a box to where you want it on your site, click on the box and something opens up where you simply paste in the code and that's it. There is even something on the Site Builder to create buttons using Paypal is well and you don't have to have pay for a Store to use it. Some time maybe I will take the time to figure out how to build a website with Dreamweaver, but I wanted to get the show on the road so to speak.
I think the above two things are what really made it so I got moving and made it easy for me and it's always good to get moving or else you don't get anything done, obviously.
I have found other great easy resources I'll go into on later posts.

Until next time,
Claire