For me, I do have experience in this and could have even coded it by hand if I wanted to but I chose to use WordPress.  WordPress has become my favourite way of building sites.  It is fast, easy and can be set up very well for SEO.  Maybe I’ll do a post on that down the road.  But for now I am using wordpress with the Corporate Theme put out by StudioPress.  In fact, the exact same setup as on themarketersmind.com.  I like the Corporate theme – it has a good layout that is easy to navigate and presents a simple, yet nice site.  I love the Featured Content Plugin they integrate as well.  It can take a bit of customizing if you want to change the menu or things like that.

OK, platform and theme selected.  Now create the site.  So, let’s think about the goals of this site.  We want to come up in the search engines of course, we can to present a very professional image to anyone who goes to the site and once people come to the website, we want them to call us on the phone.  At the end of the day, all of our business will be done on the phone.  We can’t offload that to the website.  There are special requests that people have, questions they need answered and so on.  We can put as much info as possible on the site but eventually they need to call us on the phone.  So the goal of the site is to presell our company and lead to a phone call.

Now we post all the info we can think of on our site.  We listed different packages we offer, obviously our contact info and definitely lots of pictures.  This business is one that has to be visually appealing and we want our site to show off our limousine.

I figured that instead of just relaying theories an ideas to you that it might be interesting to watch a real business being developed.

So, I have a new – from the ground up project that we are going to work on.  We are referring to this as the limousine project.  Here is the background…

I recently took over an existing local business.  This is a very local, service business.  A limousine company – www.StarsLuxuryLimousine.com.  Almost as basic a company as you can get.  We have one car, I got a few leads, company name, existing website and phone number.

Go time…

For me, first and foremost (obviously) is to get the website in order.  The site that they had was not bad but for me, that is where marketing starts.  For me a website is a good place to organize your marketing and refine your copy.