You are not a web programmer. You are a jewelry business owner. It should not be your job to program your website, nor should you try to learn to program your website. You should concentrate on what you do best and let the actual website programming be done by a professional.
On the other hand, website programming is totally different than managing your online product catalog, or adding content and articles to your site.
You should never set up a website without the ability to easily change the information in it. I'm not saying you need to learn how to program; I'm saying you need to learn how to change your words, photos and products.
In order to make changes you need a "Content Management System" that can be accessed through a web browser. The content management system, or CMS for short, gives you easy editorial control over every page of your website.
Regardless which company programs your website, make sure you have the ability to make changes through a CMS. Please do not pay for service from any website programmer not offering a CMS.
There are thousands of different CMS solutions available. Every programmer will have a preferred CMS, and they will set it up for you.
There's usually a lot of work that goes into setting up a website with a content management system, but once it's completed you should not need to do any additional programming.
There are a few freely available CMS programs, but I have to warn you that "free" usually never means "free." The free CMS programs I have personally reviewed take several days of your time to set up simple features like navigation and page layout. They are usually difficult to upgrade by a programmer when needed.
You will have to pay your programmer to do the software installation for you. Most of the time the programming cost will be more expensive than if you went with a paid shrink wrapped proprietary CMS solution that only includes features you need.
Don't get me wrong, it might sound like a CMS is a bad thing. It's not. You just have to find the right one for your needs, and something you feel is feature rich enough, yet easy to use.
Some of the mobile marketing ideas presented on jWAG come directly from real world research my jWAG's founder Matthew Perosi. His twitter @matthewperosi publishes information specific to jewelry and his @mobilegurutips tracks his Foursquare and Gowalla check-ins as well as real world mobile ideas he thinks of or finds.
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BEHIND THE SCENES jWAG is Free!
There's a lot of good SEO training stuff out there, but we're the only website who use jewelry terms in our examples...
jWAG is the research and training department of JewelerWebsites.com, and we provide our online training for free. No scam, no gimmick, everything you read on jWAG
is the same SEO and online marketing techniques that we provide our paying customers.
Our Daily Golden Nugget email subscribers are occasionally offered free services so we can evaluate new SEO techniques and emerging web technologies.
A typical SEO firm will request you fill out a "quote form" before they tell you exactly what they do for you or their price. We know that
many of you guys--our readers from the jewelry industry--are cautious about your technology investments and media buying. This is why we've created jWAG, to
help you learn a little and understand what it takes to have a successful jewelry website and online marketing.
With a little SEO knowledge you can better evaluate any SEO firm before hiring them.
Will you have time to do this yourself? Maybe not, but feel free to hire your own in-house web person and give them the job of reading and using jWAG.
That will be much less expensive than hiring us or someone else.
We try to write everything on jWAG so you can easily follow without too much geek speak. All our examples are written using jewelry lexicon so you can use them directly
or copy the techniques directly without rethinking. We hope it's a great time saver.
If you do decide to throw up your hands and give up we'd hope
you give us a call, but before you do, make sure to check out your options from your POS company because they might have an easy beginner website. Another beginner
website could come from one of your jewelry vendors.
When you are ready to use the power of jWAG you should just call JewelerWebsites.com or do a Google search
for "jewelry website design" for the other experts in the jewelry website design industry.
Here are some quick links into JewelerWebsites.com:
