How did you do your distillery website?

[thatbrianmoore]

If anyone needs a simple site done for them, I could definitely be able to do it for pretty low cost, my last project was under $500 (http://hinmanvineyards.com I cannot take credit for the graphic design of the logo though, also I did not write content on there as the company wanted to save money. My girlfriend is a professional content writer if you need that service.). I'm currently working on my API building skills since I can't stand most CMS's I've used, but if you want a ground up design and development (No temples) with content management I could definitely come in at under $2k. As you can tell from that example, my design style tends to be a bit minimal and fast, but I can work with whatever needs you have. SEO is a bit of a different beast, a lot of companies do it in rather sketchy ways that Google does not appreciate and will ding you for it. Good SEO will either take a good amount of effort on your part through social media and blogs or using a marketing company to do that for you (I know a great one if you need one too). Also, I love working with businesses that I can get behind and offer discounted rates if I know I'm going to enjoy working with you.

Also, as far as software goes, there are simple options out there like Dreamweaver if you want to easily do it yourself, but honestly I learned enough CSS and HTML when I started in one weekend to launch a site. If you can do that, all you need is a text editor like Sublime Text. I know code seems pretty daunting at first, but it's very easy to just Google examples of code these days. I think Dreamweaver has improved lately, but it's expensive and it used to produce pretty bad code.

[Natrat]

Dreamweaver is much better than it was, as are the current generation of Adobe products. They spit out much less gobbeldygook HTML than they used to.

It's not hard to learn HTML and CSS, but you have to add that to the list of new skills you need to run your own distillery! A reasonably well-maintained, active content site shouldn't cost you more than about $800 or so, unless you are trying to have product finders, mobile pages, and custom apps. Search optimization can cost more, but I find that a good cross section of metatags and frequent updating of content works better for getting your site at the top of google's hitpage! Blog once a week, and that will do far more for your optimization than paying someone to think of every term that might be searched and then submitting those to the GIGO guys.

Most of our action seems to happen on Facebook ( I hate Facebook, for the record) and the website doesn't see that kind of traffic.

[hiredguns]

Website design is a service that we offer. (We actually started out as a purely web design company.)

But honestly, we’re slowly getting out designing and building websites. There are so many great tools that let Joe Public create very slick sites with no training and they’ve cheaper than they’ve ever been. Squarespace is at the forefront of this, IMO.

Essentially, the bottom is falling out of the web design market. There will always be organizations that need large, custom sites. But for smaller sites… well... designers and developers just aren't needed any more.

I’d say you should avoid anyone who quotes you more than $3k for a site these days. They probably have a set platform that they like to work with and they probably like to work with it because they work with it. (Most web shops aren’t eager to explore new tools as they come available.)

[thatbrianmoore]

Dreamweaver is much better than it was, as are the current generation of Adobe products. They spit out much less gobbeldygook HTML than they used to.

It's not hard to learn HTML and CSS, but you have to add that to the list of new skills you need to run your own distillery! A reasonably well-maintained, active content site shouldn't cost you more than about $800 or so, unless you are trying to have product finders, mobile pages, and custom apps. Search optimization can cost more, but I find that a good cross section of metatags and frequent updating of content works better for getting your site at the top of google's hitpage! Blog once a week, and that will do far more for your optimization than paying someone to think of every term that might be searched and then submitting those to the GIGO guys.

Most of our action seems to happen on Facebook ( I hate Facebook, for the record) and the website doesn't see that kind of traffic.

That's good to know about the Adobe stuff. I have a CC subscription for Illustrator and Photoshop mostly and never dreamed of downloading those. As far as mobile pages go, I would say you should not pay too much more to have a site be responsive these days. With Bootstrap, Foundation and other frameworks being so commonplace, it should be expected to have a site be compatible across platforms.

A problem with SEO is that if you're not hiring someone to take of it for you, a small company is never going to get hits for common search terms. Natrat you definitely got it right, you're probably better off concentrating on social media and just let people find your site once they already know of your product.

Good call on Squarespace Hiredguns, forgot about them, you can definitely crank out a great site with them. Also, I think I saw that Serpent Cider label on thedieline recently? Anyway, you guys do fantastic work.

[hiredguns]

Yeah, Squarespace is fantastic. Responsive out of the box. Get some great photography of your products, people, and facilities and pop that into one of their templates. Adjust the colour scheme to match your brand. Can't go wrong.

And yeah... Serpent Cider was on the DieLine a little while back

[Jedd Haas]

Yeah, Squarespace is fantastic.

I find that Squarespace sites don't display in several of my browsers. Perhaps I'm out of date with them. But regardless, this causes an immediate loss of interest whenever this happens. Not so fantastic.

The larger point is that while overly proprietary platforms like Squarespace (and others) may be very easy, they can have huge unknown pitfalls. How many visitors are you losing because your proprietary platform fails or is just annoying?

[hiredguns]

I find that Squarespace sites don't display in several of my browsers. Perhaps I'm out of date with them. But regardless, this causes an immediate loss of interest whenever this happens. Not so fantastic.

The larger point is that while overly proprietary platforms like Squarespace (and others) may be very easy, they can have huge unknown pitfalls. How many visitors are you losing because your proprietary platform fails or is just annoying?

Huh... interesting. My experience with the current Squarespace templates has been just the opposite... I find them to be fully responsive and consistent across the various browsers.

And re. the larger point... I totally agree with you. I wouldn't push people toward Squarespace if I didn't believe their platform was up to the task.

[tl5612]

Wordpress is incredible.

There are some great themes around, or you could even pay a couple thousands pounds/dollars and get a completely custom site using a developer. Either way the CMS is fantastic, which means you don't have high maintenance costs - you can make blog posts, edits, etc. yourself.

I wouldn't use anything else.