ScENT (to) the world.

Our webpage is now live!

www.scentcosmetics.com

And the best bit... it cost us almost nothing!

As you may know I am not the most "techno" savvy person in the world; rather I tend to be a "tech? No!" kinda guy.  So, How did we do it?

I've been playing all year at the idea of a website.  We know its good to have for business cards, provides a base from which we can launch ourselves on the internet and perhaps increases the chances of us being found on search.

Ideally, I'd love to have a shop on our page so we don't loose money to Etsy, Folksy, Tosouk et al. but the reality is that you can pay hundreds if not thousands for a webpage with its own shop.  It is good for people who have never heard of the above sites but it doesn't provide a feasible solution for me the seller on a shoestring budget.

Initially we compromised.  We set up the blog, facebook and shop.  Slowly we added a few other shops, Photobucket, Pinterest and Wanaloo all in the vain hope it may increase publicity.

This created one major difficulty.  It was impossible to add all the above plus an e-mail/snail address and telephone number to a business card.  If it didn't fit, which ones should we publicise?

The solution?

Nigel Smith suggested an aggregate site (amongst other great suggestions).  I accidently discovered that we had registered on one for free, albeit by accident.  Keen to put it to use I discovered, again by Nigel, that its possible to have our web domain re-direct to this aggregate site.  Potentially we could have one place were people could find our facebook page, pinterest, blog and shop. 

Great stuff.

Better still, I have been able to edit the menu bars so that people don't necessarily realise they are using facebook, etsy or our blog.  It all looks like it all belongs our web-page.

I confess I did struggle with an "about us" page.  My solution to that was to create a second blog which will remain unedited and without comments for the duration of its existence.  I linked this to the site and set up the order as follows:

About us: Blogger
Portfolio: Photobucket
Shop: Etsy
Blog: Blogger
Newsfeed: Facebook
Contact Us: provided on flavor me.

I gave the background photo (above) to make it look consistent throughout and edited thet settings.  Its a cheap option (around £35-40 quid) but it has everything we need in the one place and is much much cheaper than getting it designed from scratch.  It also allows us a place to launch from.

Perhaps you should give it a go!