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I would like to know how many practices manage there own web page. Do practices out source the design and updating of their web pages or does someone in the office take on that task. How much does maintaining a dynamic web page that posts sales cost? If anyone does manage their web page where did they learn the skill? thanks
I manage the website for the office I work in. While I have the ability to write a website in HTML (I learned how to in college) it takes a long time, so I used a website builder. I use Wix, but there's also Weebly, Godaddy, and countless other websites that use customizeable templates. As long as you have a picture in your head of what you want you website to look like it generally doesn't take any programming skill to set it up. All those sites are free to use the templates so if you want to play around with one to see if it's something you can do.
If you decide to publish the website (make it visible to the internet) you can generally do it for free if you limit the size and number of hits to your website. There are also subscriptions that those websites will have that manage hosting and domain hosting (buying your own website name).
You can also do a google search for Optometrists to look at other websites to get an idea of what you want your site to look like.
As far as cost, if you're hiring someone it's not going to be cheap doing a quick search I saw rates of $60-$120/hour for website designer consulting fees and figure a minimum of 8-10 hours for the initial website (if can be more or less depending on how many pages and how much data per page you are using)
Check with your local colleges to see if they have programs to hire students as those rates will generally be less.
As for the question as to where I learned my skills, I've been using the internet since 1996, I design websites that I like looking at. I did have some website design classes in college, but that was so long ago that most of that knowledge I learned from that is useless. There are tons of blogs and forums on website design, SEO optimization, when I feel like I might be missing something I do google searches and there's a 99% chance that someone had the same problem or a similar problem and I'm able to use that solution (or a variation thereof).
The website that I designed is joelpways.com 98% of the website was made using Wix's templates, there are some buttons and links that required me to paste in HTML code (using the Wix template) that I received from the supplier.
If you are planning to do multiple sales and you have them planned out, you can always set up the pages in advance, hide them (there's an option for that) and publish it (unhide the page to make it live) on the day you want the sale to start. This makes it so you can set aside some time to set up the pages and not have to rush to set them up right before the sale. This would also allow you to hide the page when the sale is done and reuse it at a later date without having to set up the pages all over again.
I know I'm using term that you probably aren't familiar with, but if play with the templates you should be able to make sense of what I'm saying, you can always drop me a message if you need to.
What’s the rationale for not showing pictures of your frames and equipment or show room ?
It is extremely difficult to keep up with the stock frames that come and go, so for us, photos of frames are usually only posted on Facebook. One girl in the office manages our social media. I inherited website management after the person who created it switched companies on us. I wasn't much of a manager since I don't have time consistently for stuff like that (or maybe it was just more that I'm not really into networking and I'd rather spend down time on OB) but that was through GoDaddy and was quite simple to do. Now we have a lab that has a service available for running our website for us. We are still in the process of switching over, but I am glad to have it off my plate.
Thank you for your thoughtful and informative information. It is greatly appreciated. Sam