I run into a lot of small business, with equally small budgets, looking to get their businesses online. Usually they’re looking for more than just a simple “brochure” site with contact information and hours of operation. They want to be able to create a website to sell their products to their website visitors with as little hassle, and as much success, as they possibly can while keeping their own costs low. These projects can often times be handed over to a professional but the costs can vary wildly and the site owners, at the end of the day, might not have the level of control over their own business’s website that they’re comfortable with.

Thankfully, there’s a product out there called WebStudio that is a full-fledged website builder with ecommerce capabilities. With WebStudio you can build your own online store using their browser-based application in a matter of minutes. There are templates to pick from for your site so that it has a professional look to present to your customers. All of the site maintenance and updates are handled by the storeowner themselves so they always know that they’re in control and responsible for the content on their own site.

Originally, my freelance career was built around the concept of design site services for local and regional small businesses. As the years have gone by and my client list has matured and grown the transition from 100% devotion to design has started to decrease.

I find myself relying more and more, as the demand for my development services increases, on finding an outside website design company to help me with the graphical front end to my own personal, side projects. This has proven especially true with the growth in my web development career where I’m more interested in getting side projects done quickly and efficiently so that I can get back to focusing on client work.

The vast improvement in free web design templates has also helped me out a lot lately. Again, for personal projects, a free or low-cost design template is a great way to get an alpha or beta version of a site idea out and into the wild quickly. I find myself prototyping layouts and admin panels for my projects using free templates more and more. When the project hits a certain point where I’m happy with the behind-the-scenes action I can then go back in and worry about improving the look and feel of the site for visitors.

Here’s a quick hit set of MySQL command-line instructions that will take create a new table in your database with the structure of an existing table and then duplicate the content as well:

CREATE TABLE new_stuff LIKE old_stuff;
INSERT new_stuff SELECT * FROM old_stuff;

This is a great and quick way to make dummy tables of data for testing purposes or for making regular table backups inside your own database for easy comparison or a million other uses that come up every day when working with databases.

I’ve always told myself that I should probably do a better job of advertising my services to the local business community. As a programmer I’m not exactly the sharpest marketing tool in the drawer so I need help when it comes to things like advertising. A big part of advertising when you’re trying to operate locally is with direct mailings and printed materials. Companies like PS Print Printing offer printing solutions for individual and business use that you might find helpful.

PSP provides a low cost alternative for printing custom postcards, business cards and even greeting cards. You supply them with a photo, or a prepared advertisement image, and PS Print will print your item for you. They have a simple ordering process that makes it easy for anyone interested in printing their own cards for Christmas, birthday parties or weddings to get the job done.

For my purposes, business card and brochure printing is available for cheap prices. I’m also thinking about getting some postcard printing done for some direct mail work to area businesses to promote my services in programming and web site design. Outside of work I find a lot of the services offered by PS Print to be useful when the holiday come around and my family is looking for a change of pace from the typical store bought greeting cards.

I’m a pretty avid watcher of the website sales at SitePoint and Digital Point. I’ve written about my experiences at these two sites before as a matter of fact.

Recently, over the course of the last few months, as the economy has taken a nosedive I’ve seen a similar drop in the number of quality sites being listed and sold at these sites. You can take a quick look yourself and see that people on SitePoint and DP that are selling anything are more or less pushing spammy junk for cheap prices. It’s a rare occurrence when something good comes along and when it does it isn’t on the market for long before someone snatches it up.

Finding Good Sites For Sale

Since the people normally involved in the buying and selling of websites trade are slowing down their activity it’s time for people looking to buy in this market to get proactive.

If you’re looking to buy a real, quality web site you should no longer be looking on SitePoint and Digital Point with any hopes of success. Instead, go out and find sites you like and contact them directly and ask if they’d be willing to sell.

You might be surprised to discover not only the number of people willing to sell their site to you but their asking prices as well. I certainly recommend giving it a shot and seeing how things go. The worst thing that can happen is someone says no.