I am always wanting to get to work on mine. I've put about 10 hours into mine over the last 3-4 years. One day, I will put another hour into it, then 6 months later, I can put another hour or two. Mine is chaotic to view. I don't have money to pay someone to do a new one. In the mean time, I'm making a living. If I made it more attractive for people to visit my website and do more business with me....then I would have too much business. This type of work is laborious work. One person can only do so much. I will never have a great prosperous business just doing seps and art.
I want mine to be dumb and simple like me. You come, you see what is needed, get the contact info and send me an email with your jpg to quote on. It's not even that simple yet. Mine is still to complicated to get into and find things. Thats my fault. Contradicting Homers theory, for me, I never needed to have a website for 98% of my customers. I am positive that it's different for a retail store. An Abercrombi &Fitch is expected to have a nice website that is interactive.
A strong majority of my customers I've known through my connections and previous jobs. The other % is via these forums over the years. The new people that "happen" to find my website still do business with me because they are looking for my type of work.
For 90% of my websites life, I had it to where you needed to register to see anything. You still need to register to see the bigger parts of it. Of those that register at my site, I have about a 98% rate actually sending me a job. They do that because of what I can do. Not because of the look of my website. If I had to guess, 3% of these new people coming to me have done google searches on color separators or something similar. The others have already heard of me. It's kind of heard to find my website directly actually. Most new customers find me through old post.
When they come to my website, They see it's chaotic but still do business with me. Why? Because they are not coming to do business because of my website. They are coming to get what I can do for the tee shirts.
I think that is the nuts and bolts of the argument. Plenty of people have ugly websites yet do great business. A Pretty website is not always necessary. I think easiness is very important. One day, I will make mine easy. Probably more so, when I actually need to.
The Joomla interface (to me) is like learning Photoshop all over again. I got no time for that and don't have 3-5k to pay someone. I guess if I was doing so good in my business that I actually had 5k to pay on a website, that I would be sooo busy that I didn't really need a website. :0 I just need something more simple and clean.
