BP12b: Website Building Woes
20th July 2019 - 6th August 2019
In my previous blog post, I covered our strategy for Online Presence. This post will focus on the hiccups faced when we went about trying to create a website.
1) First of all, notice that our website is built with Wordpress, and not by Wix.
Wix had a much better website builder than Wordpress. Kimmy and Sindy spent hours on the design (in fact, the wix version is live here), their work practically went down the drain when Facebook and Instagram basically blocked our website from being shared on facebook, or as our bio link on instagram. We tried communicating with Facebook to get it resolved, however, even after a few days had passed, we did not receive any solution from Facebook.
We also tried using our own domain (flormiere.com) to redirect users to our wix website. However, this attempt was blocked once Facebook & Instagram realized the redirection link pointed back to the "blocked" wix website.
Therefore, I had no choice but to rebuild another website using wordpress (which has worked as a very stable blogging platform for my personal tech blog site #TechWithAaron). I did the website this time since I was very well-versed with the wordpress.com website builder.
2) The Redirect link did not really work out the way we wanted it to - but we did what we can to make use of it.
Here's the story behind:
-We decided to spend the least money possible on creating a website, while still owning a domain name. This is because our group felt that it was very unlikely users will want to visit our website (Much less purchase from it). Today, social media is so prevalent, that customers are used to directly "following" a brand's page, and most of the time, don't mind going directly to a shopping platform (e.g. Lazada or Shopee) to read more about the product and purchase from there. Furthermore, handling online payment through the website, while possible, is not free, and worse, most customers are very wary about entering credit card details on an unknown site (Many would rather have a middlemen like Shopee, so they as customers can reach out to the online sales platform for a dispute resolution, if the products are not delivered as described).
-We then researched: How much money would it cost to create the website with our own domain + a proper website builder (since we don't know HTML coding too well, we wanted something that allowed us to build a professional looking website). Our research led to the discovery of 3 possible website builders (and their pricing)
So, it would seem like it costs $54.20 to create the website, but that's with Wix - Which is a provider which we already had issues sharing the prototype (actually fully done) website on our social media pages.
Our next best option would be Bluehost or Wordpress.com, both of which has a respectable wordpress hosting builder which we can use to design the website. However, both costs between $71.20 and $84. Our group was thinking: Could we get it for cheaper?
Why not use a re-direct specialist site, which allows us to buy our own domain, and get this "re-direct" domain to bring users to our wordpress website?
That solution only costs us $14.90 for the first year!!! "WOW, HUGE SAVINGS!"
"PAY PEANUTS, GET MONKEYS"...🙈🙈
In the end, we really got what we pay for. We got ourselves "big monkeys"!
Notice that our domain (which we shared earlier in this post), must be keyed in as "https://flormiere.com/home", rather than just "flormiere.com". This was a limitation that we did not expect to face when we signed up with our provider.
This resulted because We didn't take read the fine print carefully, and only after we purchased the domain with them, did we realize that in order to actually get the "Flormiere.com" website to redirect to our blog directly (without adding the "/home" suffix), we had to pay for the premium account access - which was another $29 a month! This meant we had gone one whole round - It costs much more than Bluehost, is more expensive than WIX, except this time, we don't have the website directly connected to it!!! And because we could not directly connect the wordpress site to "flormiere.com", this also meant that the "flormiere.com" website would appear in Google search rankings, but not take users anywhere. Users will still see "Flormiere.wordpress.com" when they google search for "flormiere".
But that wasnt all. We had another (bigger) problem: Prof Roderick, during the second consultation, warned us that we did not technically own the domain. A quick check on WHOIS would have revealed this (unfortunately, no one in our group knew about ownership of domains). Prof warned us that this could leave us vulnerable in future, as the provider holds the domain, and technically can hold us ransom if we ever want to changed to another provider.
Fortunately, I was able to approach the website re-direct provider, and they agreed to allow us to transfer the domain ownership to a domain provider of our choice. However, we would need to wait till ICANN's 60 day's "freeze" on details within the domain transfer (Change of Registrant) to pass, before we can successfully transfer the domain to another provider.
So, for now, we just had to make the best out of what we have.
We came up with the above URL, flormiere.com/home as a workaround to continue using our newly purchased domain for our business in the meantime. This Workaround URL brings people to our Flormiere wordpress website, while still looking somewhat more professional than a wordpress website.
This experience came as a rude awakening that we really needed to research and ask around if we weren't sure of anything. This mistake was a costly one for our startup (in terms of time), and in future business start-up's, would severely impact the timeline of creating a nice looking website and other business operations, if repeated elsewhere.