Sep 24 2008
Website for Your Freelance Business
Let’s Talk Freelancing!
Okay, so you’ve set up your freelance business, you’ve made the business cards, invoices, letterhead, company name… you’ve applied for an EIN with the IRS… you set up your workspace in your home and have all the necessary supplies.
Now what?
The next step is to look for ways to promote your business, so people can find you or have a place to go to learn more about you when you find them.
You Need a Web Presence!
It is nearly impossible in today’s market to have a business without at least some sort of web presence. Freelancing is so much easier when you have a website where you can put samples, mock-ups, contact information and have an online portfolio of sorts, all in one place for potential clients to see.
Websites don’t have to be expensive. Hosting can be as cheap as two or three dollars per month all the way up to a couple hundred per month, depending on what you plan to do with it. The typical freelancer doesn’t need a big fancy web package though. Let’s look at what you need to do to get a website up and running for your freelance business.
Buy a Domain
The domain name is the name that is going to go in your browser for the URL. That is, the link that you will give to others to make it to your website. The domain name is likely going to be your email address too, if you use a domain mail service, so you might want to consider that when deciding on the length of your domain name. For my personal website, I purchased the domain www.MichelleLDevon.com, which is, of course, the pen name I use for my writing. For my business, I used www.AccentuateServices.com, which is the name of my business. For my writing forum, I chose www.writersforum.info . These are simple, easy to remember domain names that all refer to what the website is all about. They are all hosted on the same hosting package, though, so two of them are forwarded to the main domain.
When buying a domain, you’ll want to consider the name as well as the extension, i.e. dot com, dot info, dot net, etc. The .com and .net domain extensions are the most popular, but that also means they are the most expensive. The .info domain and the .biz domains are less popular, and some services actually look at these extensions as being ‘less than’ the .com or .net domain extensions. Still, a .info or .biz domain is much cheaper than their .com and .net counterparts.
If you can afford it, I recommend purchasing both the .net and .com versions of your domain name. My business, Accentuate Services, had a web presence for nearly three years, when suddenly, I noticed another Accentuate Services pop up on my Google searches. They had purchased the accentuateservices.net domain, and then, because of my hard work in promoting my website, they appeared immediately under mine in the searches, with a really bad website, offering similar administrative services as I offered. I wish I had chunked down the extra seven bucks to purchase both domains.
Even if you can’t afford hosting, buy the domain as soon as you settle on a name for your business, or purchase your ‘name’ as a domain, so you are certain to have the domain. I’ll discuss ways to use the domain later, without paying for hosting, if you need to. Domains can be as cheap as $2-10 bucks. They are well worth the investment.
Hosting Package
Purchasing a domain doesn’t necessarily mean you are purchasing a hosting package. Some domain registrars, like GoDaddy, offer free hosting packages for individuals with the purchase of the domain, and then you can add on special services you want to add. I have found hosting packages for really cheap and I’ve found them for really expensive. Do your homework, because sometimes you do get what you pay for. Search for scams and warnings and information about the host prior to purchasing a package. Some hosting packages will let you pay by the month, while others will advertise a monthly payment, but will require a year in advance to get that low ‘monthly’ rate.
Can’t Afford Hosting?
I know that purchasing hosting can be expensive when you are first starting out. Some companies don’t let you pay by the month, so you have to cough up a hundred bucks or more to get hosting for your domain for the year. As I said earlier, some domain registrars offer free simple hosting for purchasing a domain. If you can find one of them, do so!
Another option for hosting is to use a free hosting site, like Geocities (Yahoo!), Google Pages, or other websites that offer free personal hosting. You can go into your domain control panel and set it up so your domain is forwarded to one of those free hosting platforms.
Another option many people are starting to use is blogs as websites. WordPress blogs have ‘pages’ you can add, so there is navigation similar to a website, and you can pick all sorts of nice, professional templates making it as easy as typing a blog post to build a webpage for your site. Take your domain and forward it to the blog site that is hosting the blog. Blogger, Wordpress, and a few other blog platforms offer very easy to use publishing formats, they’re free, and you can even put advertising on the sites through these blogs (though I don’t really recommend advertising on the freelancing part of your website).
Domain Email
Email doesn’t always come standard with a domain or hosting package, so be sure that you purchase domain mail if you want to use a professional looking and easy to remember email name that is related to your business. I have michelle@accentuateservices.com and michelle@michelleldevon.com for my emails, but I also have a ‘catch all’ so I can get other emails with the same domain name, but different email name. It’s not professional looking to use a ‘free’ email service like Yahoo or Hotmail for your professional email, so using a domain email is a great way to appear more professional in your business dealings.
Building the Site
There is no need to be fearful of building a website for yourself. It’s not as hard as you might think, and most hosting providers even have very easy templates with drag and drop WYSIWYG editors (what you see is what you get). It’s as simple as picking a template, uploading the pictures you want to use, drag and drop them where you want them, and then write your text. Again, GoDaddy has some simple free hosting packages with decent templates to get you started, and you can always add to the templates and alter them or even build your own site later when you learn more about building webpages. The simple templates will get you started though, at a reasonable cost.
Tomorrow, I’ll talk a little bit about what to put on a freelance website, so you have a good online portfolio, must-haves, don’ts and more, so stay tuned!
For now, if you don’t have a web presence, start searching! Purchase your domain name today! I’m not necessarily recommending GoDaddy, nor endorsing them, per se, but they do have reasonable prices, easy to use navigation and domain control, free hosting packages, and they accept PayPal for those who don’t want to give out financial information.
Stay tuned tomorrow for some tips on building a freelance website.
Happy freelancing!
Love and stuff,
Michy
