Website
So being around online ecommerce and previously working at a domain/hosting/website builder company you do pick things up.
Making a simple website is pretty easy. This website won’t be needed (just yet) for online commerce, it’s just a few pages to showcase, signpost and sell my services. I selected Squarespace to get up and running quickly. I had all the pages done offline in some form or other. I bought a few domains and started playing around…and here’s the result. If you’re a web developer who’s also getting their car done, I would love to hear your thoughts and where I can improve on design!
Purchasing domains names again is pretty easy, I did it through my old company GoDaddy who are pretty competitive on price.
Logo design…esh…now things are starting to get harder. I had a few concepts I’d hand drawn. The first was the outline of well known german sports car which hasn’t change their shape for a while. The other was what you can see here, which is the ice blasting gun with a isometric ‘look’. I first tried Fiverr. To be absolutely frank. The quality of the work received back was shocking…twice. So, I just went and purchased a Adobe licence and did it myself and managed to edit and modify what you see today from the crap received from the Fiverr contractor.
SEO…oh wow…I have known about SEO for a long time…well, I knew what the letters stood for. What I didn’t appreciate was the work required to get high Google ranking. What I should do is employ a local digital agency to handle this…what I don’t have is the urge to spend what they charge just yet. So again…I’ve gone to Fiverr (you may see a pattern here). There’s several pillars to good SEO. There’s good ‘White-hat’ SEO and there’s naughty ‘Black-Hat’. I’m firmly in the white-hat camp. So I’ve auditored my pages to make sure they’re clean for Google ranking and keywords. I’m now into the local SEO journey, looking to list my site in high authority directories so that I start ranking higher to potential customers in the locality. It’s a slow process…I’ll do a bigger blog post in the future mapping my journey.
Right now, I’m ranking in 5th place on Google for “Surrey Dry Ice Blasting” and that’s taken 2 weeks to get there. I really want 1st place and ranking for a broader set of keywords covering Hampshire, Berkshire and Greater London. I want to rank anywhere in the UK when someone googles dry ice cleaning or detailing - that’s going to take some more work (and money) I fear…
