Setting Up My Web Design Mini Business [Case Study]

Reading time: Approximately 7 minutes

It started mid last year – I awoke with a start thinking I’d missed my alarm. Still, it was only just past 5am. Perfect. I turned it off before it was due to ring and silently rolled out of bed.

At 5:30am I was picked up by a high school buddy of mine, chucked my fishing rod and tacklebox into the back of his ute and we headed out to where the sea meets the shore about an hour north of Brisbane.

After pulling in a few quick catches (much to my surprise) the conversation turned to work.

My friend, Nick, was telling me about his new painting business – he’d just started out on his own after breaking off from his business partner.

Things were looking promising for Nick, and because he’s a bit younger than most of the other painters around Brisbane that have their own business it was obvious he had one advantage to play – he was a little more tech savvy than his competitors.

Now his business was setup, his thoughts turned to setting up a web presence.

I mentioned to Nick that I was thinking about setting up my own little side business building websites and would love to be able to start with his with the view to moving on to also doing other friends and family member’s websites for them.

Web designers generally charge upfront for their services. Usually it’s a sum of money that most people would not consider an insignificant amount.

Obviously I’m not in the business of ripping friends off, but I did want to somehow take advantage of this awesome opportunity that was being served to me on a platter and use it as some sort of platform for making a viable side business.

I suggested that because I don’t really want to dump the website on him and run (what actually happens to most small business owners unfortunately), I would stay on, kind of mentoring him on how to run his site and build up a viable web presence for his business to see him rise in the rankings.

The sad fact is that most small business websites rank well for about a month, then disappear from the search results only to send nothing but a small trickle of visitors. Hardly an effective use of money to advertise your business.

My idea was to charge Nick a small amount of money month on month, and in return help him build a website that sent him customers.

Our strategy is unfolding as follows:

1. Get the hosting sorted out

Being mindful that I wanted to save money and make this a win win scenario, I made the decision to host his website on my existing hosting account via Bluehost.

Bluehost is pretty reliable and I haven’t had a drama with them in the last two years – I feel good recommending them to anyone.

What I’ll also cover in “hosting” is my additional layer of using WPMU (WordPress Multi User) as a way to maintain control over lots of websites, including Nick’s.

2. Get the site up

Nick and I originally started this with the idea that I would come up with a couple of concepts that he might like to choose from.

What ended up happening was the exact opposite.

In the end Nick and his wife spent a night attached to their computer screen in MS Word mocking up what they thought the front page of their website should look like.

This turned out to be a better tactic and I’ll explain why later in this series.

3. Setup some basic advertising

While this wasn’t a massive thing as the general idea was to generate new leads via search engine results (meaning we don’t have to keep paying to get those leads) we did want to do a little advertising as a way to get the website’s address out there.

This involved a couple of tasks including updating his business stationery and preparing local listings.

4. Blogging

As a painter, I’m sure you can imagine Nick’s thoughts on blogging at the start.

This one was interesting because it’s hard to explain what kind of value doing this would create for a painter, but I explained why we would want to do it, and why it was important for his long term success online.

5. Getting the word out

We’re approaching this with one firm thing in mind. To gain links.

Of all the search engine optimization strategies out there for optimizing your homepage by doing a flurry of different things, getting out there and convincing people who own related websites to give you a link is the MOST effective.

We’re seeing if we can do a number of things for our friends around the internet including giving them guest blog posts, answering some Q&A’s, and anything else they want to get a link back and, of course, provide some value to the community.

Summary

So… that’s the bird’s eye view.

While this project isn’t the most rewarding in terms of time investment and monetary return, it IS extremely rewarding for me in a number of ways.

I’m learning a massive amount from the whole experience. This is really my first chance at helping a business person extend their business into the online world. That in itself is massive.

Technology wise I’m being exposed to installing and managing a WPMU installation and on top of that managing a business website that represents someone’s real bricks and mortar business. I’ve also learned about a few domaining issues, like the fact that you need an ABN (Australian Business Number) to buy and use a .com.au address.

And finally, but probably most importantly, I’m getting the satisfaction of helping out a close mate. It’s been loads of fun and we’re getting to see a little of the professional side of each other and how we work.

Hopefully after we’re up and running a little more we can go back and fish and reflect even more.

Coming up next we’ll leap into discussing the five points above and I’ll talk about some of the things we’ve come across. Sign up to the RSS feed if you’re interested in keeping up to date and let me know your thoughts so far in the comments below!

This is the first article in a series about my web design mini business case study. It’s all about the my interactions with my first website customer Nick the painter.

Next posts in this series:

2. Domains, Hosting and Making It All Repeatable
3. Getting The Site Up