I am sure that my experience is shared by thousands of you business owners out there. You are thinking that a great way to increase your sales is to have an online presence. Or if you are even more ambitious, you might want to actually sell your products on your website. Easy-peasy.

Making a quality site that people will trust and actually want to purchase from is definitely not as easy as it seemed. I knew that this is the direction that I wanted to take my company; but was not sure exactly how to go about it. I started out with a do-it-yourself web-store through Yahoo. It actually turned out pretty good; but I soon realized that it just did not have the features that I knew that I wanted. That I needed. So, I bit the bullet and shopped around for a company to make the website of my dreams. I figured it would be better to go with the middle quote, and they promised the features that I really wanted.

They wanted to charge me nearly $8,000 to make the site, and within an agreed upon time frame. I paid the first third up front, and they did the bare minimum to get me to pay the second third, then they became unreachable. I am sure that the people actually working on the site were somewhere in the Middle East, hard to follow through with them. They stopped taking my calls, did not respond to my e-mails. When I found out that they were using free software and maybe had only invested a few hours into my project over a 13 week period; I took my ball and went home.

My next designer was recommended by a friend, and I got to meet him and liked him personally. What I did not know, was that I would have to suffer through his learning curve. Things took much longer that I wanted; I was paying for hosting, credit card processing fees, etc. Not to mention hundreds and hundreds of hours that I put in to the databases.

To make a long story short, I finally found an expert to put the finishing touches on the site. After nearly a year and a half from conceiving this brilliant idea, I finally have a web-store that I am proud to promote. There is no simple answer to success in making a site; but my advice would be to find a local designer, with a good portfolio, and only pay as certain benchmarks are met.