Lecia+Vivian+-+Small+Businesses+Online

**Lecia Vivian - Small Businesses Online**
Started her website - end of October 2010

Lecia was asked the following questions, they are followed by the answers

because a business card can only take you to a certain point, especially when you want to expand your business. She wanted a larger audence of people to see her jewellery whenever they wanted rather then showing up and arranging times to show them her collections. So now all she has to do is had out her business cards and say visit dthe website to take a further look.
 * 1- why have a website?**

She did not want it linked to jewarlly in the hope to expand her business in the future to things such as home......... Her name is Lecia and her middle name is Vivian so she just did a play on her name. Lecia also bought another 7 domain names so she would have less compition, when it comes to gaining traffic of search engines because she has all the possible webnams that are similar to hers. She pays $237 every 2 years.
 * 2- why did you choose www.leciavivian.com?**

Lecia wanted a British based company because in any case she may need help and they are on a familiar timezone so she can contact them at any time. Some of her choices where: - inmotion hosting but they where American - twenty-twenty web hosting.co.uk She chose twenty-twenty web hosting. This hosting company uses dell servers, which are secure online and offline, they also helped reroute the domain name. Lecia chose the intermediate package that came with 40 GB bandwidth. This company also has a control panel for the iPhone which allowed her to connect anywhere, anytime.
 * 3- why did you choose the hosting company?**

Lecia took a course to help herself crate the website and understand more about running an online business. The course was a UK open learning online course called 'webstart', it was approx 300pounds. The course allowed Lecia to design her website with the help of adobe Dreamweaver or Webcodeer. she used adobe Dreamweaver because it had more benefits, such as it opens your website in different browsers so you can check that all the formatting was correct for different sized screens. she also explored the use of helping disabilitys people may have using the internet through web accessibility disabilitys.org. She also used CSS (cascading style sheets) which was useful to her because it grouped all the design features together which allowed easy editing. Lecia decided not to use a design company because they were expensive, for example the company Blue Beetle was 2500 to 3000DHS and the maintenance fee would cost extra at about 5000 to 6000DHS. Lecia also recommended a book called 'How to build a feasible website'
 * 4- how did you create your website?**

Lecia is hoping to expand her business through more retail aswell as being able to see her products online. But to do this she will have to reformat all her pages to hold shopping cart formating as well as a new shopping cart page. she will do this by various websites she has researched. They are PayPal (40 cent per transaction), Zencart, Cubecart, Os commerce shopping cart.
 * 5- do you have any future plans?**

Yes Lecia did research other jewelery websites but found out they all center around a major theme which id that they are pink and all girlie hence strongly directed toward women. Lecia wanted to be more contemporary and update with her look and feel of the site, thus going for more simple black, white and green color scheme.
 * 6- did you research your compition?**

Yes but has helped more through Facebook, there are more people interested in the parties Lecia holds, 4/5 of her party booking come from Facebook, most likely because it more accessible for people.
 * 7- has your website effected your business?**

Lecia says she would say "go for it and to do it yourself, even though it may take longer, it does not cost any extra money for future advancements."
 * 8- do you have any advice to other small business?**

The thing Lecia found most challenging was the way the website was laid out and formatted, because it would change everything if you only wanted one aspect changed. Hence it became time consuming and confusing to operate.
 * 9- has there been problems through the process, I so how did you over come these?**