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Originally Posted by Steve  For starters, the site will be a fitness site. It will have pretty much everything you can think of. Articles, forum, recommended readings, maybe exercise instruction vids, online training capabilities, calorie calcs, nutrition database.... list goes on. It's simply in the planning stages at the moment, but we have a lot of great ideas. It's just that we aren't sure exactly how to get them from ideas to the web.... I take it that's the developer's job.
Secondly, is it the web developer's job to get the site to come up in searches, or is that something else I have to consider... finding someone else for that?
Thirdly, marketing isn't too big a concern. I have quite a large following on the web and my partner is one of the head trainers in Philadelphia.
We tried going it on our own using homestead.com but we couldn't possibly make it as nice as we had hoped. |
You'll want to talk with a developer about how to get your ideas into a website. Between the design for the site, the database, the forum software, webhosting, etc, if you're looking to do it right, I wouldn't expect to pay anything less than $5000. Just the new messageboard skin I had designed, with new buttons, the logo, etc will be around $2000.
Regarding marketing, word of mouth and your internet following is good, but it won't hold a candle with respect to the traffic you can get compared to marketing the site with the search engines. The catch 22 is, you want to have your developer setup the site so that it's optimal from a marketing perspective. A lot of times developers don't understand Search Engine Optimization.
Then there's the issue of having to have an administrator to run the messageboard and day to day stuff with the website. It's very hard to have someone on call to fix a problem. A lot of people partner up with a computer guru to help admin their site. I've spent a lot of time learning, and I still have a long ways to go regarding coding of the website, adding features, etc. I'm capable as an admin, but once in a while I need some help. There are always software updates to the messageboard because of security flaws that are exposed, etc, and so every couple months either I upgrade the website software myself, or pay someone to do it for me.
Hope this helps.