When it comes to building a pet business website you have two main tech choices.
Either you pay someone like a web designer or techy friend to do it for you, or you learn how to do it yourself. Paying a web designer could set you back anything from $1000 to $20-30k, depending on what you’re asking them to build for you.
As you can imagine that’s not exactly a great start for building a pet business website on a shoestring!
If you’re going down the DIY route on the other hand, then I have some great news – it will be cheaper AND you will remain control of your website because you’ll know exactly how to add content and change things around on your site.
You don’t even have to learn coding because you can use ‘done for you’ website templates from a variety of website suppliers like the ones listed below. All you need to do is prepare the text you want on your site, collect the images you want to use and start populating their templates with your content. Easy peasy.
Here are some of the DIY website platforms you might want to consider
WordPress
I’ve been using WordPress for years for my pet blog as well as for the My Brand Buddy website. It is without a doubt one of the most powerful website platforms out there, and you can choose from thousands of themes, widgets and plugins to build, personalize and perfect your perfect pet business website. WordPress itself is free to use, although some of the templates are sold relatively cheaply and you would need to organize and pay for your own hosting and domain name.
The main downside with WordPress though is the steep learning curve – as long as the template you want to use looks perfect, then you might be okay. But as soon as you want to move an image or email sign up box from one side of the screen to the other you need to read up on how that particular template works, or learn how to code – both of which are not ideal when you’re busy running your own pet biz. In short – WordPress is a great choice if you’re already website savvy, or have a techy friend nearby.
Weebly – Squarespace – Wix
Weebly, Squarespace and Wix are all website builders that are a whole lot easier to use than WordPress, and will cause you less grey hairs in the process. Just like WordPress you start off with a template you like, and then you use their easy drag and drop style website building tools to personalize your website until it looks just the way you want it. Another advantage is that they all have packages where everything is included so you don’t have to worry about finding hosting and buying your domain name elsewhere.
The downside with these website builders is that they integrate with fewer third party apps like your booking software, email suppliers like Mailchimp, and so on so be sure to check this before you sign up. They are also a little bit more expensive on a monthly basis than a WordPress site – but for that money you gain full control of your site and everything web related is ‘in one place’.
Need more help?
Do you want to build a good looking website for your pet business, but not sure how to get started? To help you set up your pet biz website, or to help you improve your existing site, I’ve written book just for you – helping you get over website overwhelm and stress once and for all and finally turning your website into your main source of new business. Check it out on Amazon now.
One factor that proves helpful for pet business is social media. Try to invest in great pics. 🙂
Joomla is another good option for online pet stores.