Re: Buyer Beware

I thought I'd respond in another post rather than comments, mainly because it's easier to edit properly. I am no expert in this area, but that never stopped me from having an opinion. Isn't that the essence of blogging anyway? Dara and I are a great example of people who locate things on the web as a first choice. For example, that's how we got our landscaper who at this point has a very hard to find web site and the guy who did the mural in our house. We tried the online path for bedroom remodeling but were not happy with the people who came our way, and in the end we went with an old guy down the road who said something like "I have too much work to do already, but I'll come by and interview you to see if you're my kind of customer."

The Web Site. You have to start with a web site and a reasonable domain name. There are web site development people who should be able to put one together for you, or you could find someone with some design sense and have them help you pull one together using something like Yahoo Small Business. The other benefit of something like Yahoo Small Business is that they will take care of obtaining the domain name (e.g., www.harrisfrontroyal.com), the "hosting" (providing the actual computer somewhere that hosts your site), and the simple tools to maintain it. I don't think you need to do anything fancy. Maybe just a photo gallery of work, some brief praising comments from customers, and a way to reach you. The biggest problem with a web site is not setting it up, it's keeping it up to date. Personally, I'd keep it simple so that you don't need to worry about updating it constantly or paying someone else to do it.

Online Advertising. If you set up a domain name through Yahoo, the search engines will crawl it and index the content so that people typing in something like "harris builders front royal" will be able to find your site. There's no guarantee where it will show up in the order of hits, though. Whether you want to pay for something like Google Adwords or not, I don't know. I spent a while poking around it, and it looks really easy to do. You should just read about it online, and they have a demo that is nice. As you said in your posting, the end result would be that when someone Googles "home remodeling", based on Google's notion of where the request comes from geographically, your paid ad will show up on the right hand side of the Google search page. Web sites that use Google Adsense (a way for them to make money when someone clicks on an ad that Google serves up for display on a web site or blog) might show your ad as well. You set a budget you're willing to spend a month, and they splatter out ads to match your budget. You pay for the times people click on the ad, bringing them to your web site. Yahoo has a similar service. You could certainly try it out for a while and see if anything came out of it.