My first real use of WA saved me $5000!

bylangwog

159 followers

9 years ago

So firstly I had a great weekend, went down to Margaret River with my Fiance for a romantic getaway at Cape Lodge, if you are ever in Western Australia and want a real 5 star kid free experience in the heart of some of the best wine country on the planet check it out!

On the way home we were discussing our business ventures for the next year or so and she asked me if she should pay a well known and very good graphics design company here in Perth to build her a website to allow her to showcase and sell her Pearl Jewellery. Now I know that this would involve a minimum $5k investment with these guys and probably end up costing closer to 10, which given the value of her product is a very fair price to pay for a site.

I very nearly said yes that'd be a good idea but then I thought to myself, hang on I bet there is a wordpress template out there somewhere in the WA world that would let me build her a great looking site with all the functionality she will need for a fraction of that cost. So after 2 and a bit weeks with WA I have made my first real "income" by persuading her that I can build and host a site for her!

Over night I lay awake thinking, geez, did I just bite off more than I could chew,? have I started a new career as a web designer? Would I need to get some serious programming training??

NO, NO and NO!! I sat down today at about 8:30 AM and by 10:30 I had a great looking site using the Vogue theme with full eCommerce capabilities from Woo Commerce up and running with her first products loaded and ready for some serious content building! Using the tips that Kyle has passed on I managed to get some great free imagery from Wikimedia commons and setup a cool looking slider on the front page as well. In the past I have had a number of sites built by professionals for my real life businesses and I can truthfully say that I got further in 2 hours with a lot of learning required than the pros would get me in a matter of weeks and I would normally be clueless as to how to maintain or change what they had given me!

Now I just have to figure out how to migrate her existing domain name to WA and I can save the $20 per month we spend on hosting that (currently it is simply used as an email server..)

So for anyone out there that is marketing WA as part of the affiliate boot camp programme, there is real value in WA as a means of producing really useful websites at a fraction of the costs that the professionals will charge. What a great start to my week and further confirmation that the decision to go premium on WA was one of the smartest moves I've ever made!

I will put the site up for review once I have it more fully populated.

Cheers for now

Grant