1. Who designed your web site?
I designed it myself and have designed websites for others.

2. Do they maintain it (make changes, etc.) or do you?
I maintain my own website but those I have designed for others are maintained by them. I make my designs attractive yet simple with coding to make it as easy as possible for the clients to update it.

3. Who hosts your site?
I am hosted by Microsoft Office Live, which is actually being phased out soon. They cost $15 for a year. (it's a shame!)

4. If you wish to share - what was the approximate cost of having it built, and/or hosting?
It cost me nothing to have it built! But I do charge $15 per hour for designs.

Thanks so much for all the feedback. I have a lot of reading and thinking to do now!  I will decide in a few days what direction I will go (my daughters birthday is Monday and I have a cake to make and decorate, starting on the fondant decor tonight).

Na - you asked abut sales.  So far this month has been the biggest I have had in sales, and we are barely halfway through. Monday and Tuesday I shipped 23 puppets. I have a lot of orders still to fill and more orders in today. Plus I have a custom order to price and a conference next month - need to have a lot of puppets for that.  We had planned to take an end of season Alaskan cruise/tour to celebrate our anniv., but have put it off until spring. Just can't do it all. 

Julie,
I had a look at Volusion. They are pretty pricey in my opinion. Their lowest plan is is about $7.00 a month more then WestHost's top plan and you are getting a lot more with WestHost in regards to an actual hosting environment. It looks to me like Volusion is focused on e-commerce i.e. shopping cart sites which I must admit can be daunting to set up, but I have a feeling you may be limited to the actual cart you can use. They are offering free or no transaction fees which if you want to process credit cards outside of something like PayPal and that is something that does as a rule cost extra but have a look at the WestHost e-commerce page http://www.westhost.com/e-commerce-hosting.html  they have two companies they offer Merchant Accounts with (that is where your fees come in)  Click on the heading and you can see the fees. Based on either of those percentages do you think your monthly sales would add up to that $7.00 difference. Also if you are using PayPal now and it is working for you then with WestHost you would not even need a Merchant Account just continue to process through PayPal.  That is pretty much the same as what Na was saying.

Unless it has changed, WestHost has a thirty day guarantee. Pretty sure they do ask for a CC card up front though.  While you can get a discount for purchasing more months of hosting at one time there are no "contracts" really.

I hope that really does not seem like a hard sell. WestHost may not be right for you but not real sure that Volusion would be also and I wanted to point some things out.   I think that is what Na was trying to say also and wanted to reinforce it.

One thing I think this thread is showing that if any one out there is looking at starting a website or improving a current one that there are many of us here that would be willing to lend a hand. 

P.S. Gabriel wins hands down on hourly rates.  I charge $25.00 per hour so you should snap him up fast before he catches on if you are looking for web design help.   That being said I am more then happy to consult with folks on issues they may have for free. I love solving problems. 

3. Who hosts your site?
I am hosted by Microsoft Office Live, which is actually being phased out soon. They cost $15 for a year. (it's a shame!)

Just wanted to comment on MOL: Lisa was using it originally, and we both decided it wasn't the best in the world. For the same cost, you can get a host that provides more options.

For a start, MOL requires you to use their website builder, which means you can't easily backup the files and move it to another web host: no other host will use MOL's builder. Their backups are also Microsoft specific files, so unless you use MOL, you have no way of uploading the files somewhere else (or even unpacking the files to your computer to edit them).

Their website builder also means that you're VERY limited in what your template looks like and does, which means that basic stuff - like changing the colour of a particular piece of text - often applies across the board.

Images are another problem, in that they don't accept .png files (transparent background files).

And so on.... It may be handy for beginners, but you can achieve the same results elsewhere for the same cost with other packages that are just as easy to use with a little time spent trying it out.

I think the biggest thing is people look for something that's easy to use, but they also forget to try different hosts/programs and see what it can do. If you're looking into this kind of thing you don't want to exchange ease-of-use for the ability to provide a good sales experience to your customer.

In fact, you may be making it easier for you to use, but making it harder for the visitor to use in the long run.

Out of all the website builders I've tried, MOL has to be one of the more annoying ones out there. (Not disparaging them at all; I started off at Webs.com, tried Bravenet, etc. In the end, it's worth paying for a proper host and having the flexibility to set up my site however I want without worrying about the limitations of the inbuilt functionality. It's just now I install a program that suits my needs, instead of being forced to use the default one. Costs the same, except for saving me aggravation)

Na - you asked abut sales.  So far this month has been the biggest I have had in sales, and we are barely halfway through. Monday and Tuesday I shipped 23 puppets. I have a lot of orders still to fill and more orders in today. Plus I have a custom order to price and a conference next month - need to have a lot of puppets for that.  We had planned to take an end of season Alaskan cruise/tour to celebrate our anniv., but have put it off until spring. Just can't do it all. 

That's certainly far more than I'm doing But then I'm actively avoiding sales at the moment whilst I change a few things.

I guess the bigger question is: are these sales coming through your website? If they're not, then it may be worth just tidying up a few things that visitors might find difficult to use; if yes, then it could be worth doing a customer survey and seeing what people think of the site and fixing those things, since your sales don't suffer because of the layout.

Mmmm... fondant.... :P

@NA - all sales have been through the website.

Another thing... for credit cards, Check out Square (https://squareup.com).  It is great for those of us doing conferences, etc., in that it is portable without having to pay for a phone or wifi hookup onsite.  You plug the card swiper into your smart phone and accept cards.  Set up and the card swiper are free. The fees are lower than any I have seen, and the money is deposited into the bank account you designate nightly.  You can take all 4 cards (Visa, MC, AMEX and Disc) without having separate accounts.  You can also manually enter card numbers for a slightly higher fee. 

I checked this out before I signed up.  Kim Kommando (America's digital goddess on the radio and a techie all the way) says it's the best thing out there. 

@NA - all sales have been through the website.

Well then, as I said before, if people are purchasing a lot then it may be just that you update the site in areas that you think need it and otherwise stick with the layout as it is. Personally I found it easy to use, just the coder in me noticed a few things that a good web designer would know about and fix. (Which is me politely suggesting that your previous web designer is out of touch with current standards)

Full disclosure: I'm no expert on web design so anything I say can be safely ignored. My websites are hosted on Hostgator for about $12 per month. I went with them in part because of the price, and even more because they use C-Panel to do the behind the scenes work which is so much easier than some of the other hosting sites.

I don't do much hand-coding anymore, instead I mostly use Joomla, an open-source content management system. There are lots of templates available for free, as well as templates that you can buy. It took me a little while to understand exactly how Joomla works, but once I did, it became very easy for me to use in a variety of circumstances. I even made a very rudimentary template of my own for one website because I couldn't find anything like what I wanted, and couldn't begin to afford custom work.

A drawback to using one of the various content management systems like Joomla, Drupal or Concrete 5 is that no matter what the template, they tend to look alike. That's what I have against the current standards of website construction these days. There is little variety in the appearance of websites anymore. The plus side of that is that it isn't hard to find templates that are professionally designed and look good.

At any rate, I have been pretty satisfied with using Joomla. It's easy for amateurs to add and change content. There are add-ons (called extensions) that you can purchase or get for free to add functionality to the site, including PayPal links.

Joomla is free, and any web-hosting company that offers C-Panel will have a simple way to install Joomla so that you could have a website up and running in minimal time.

A drawback to using one of the various content management systems like Joomla, Drupal or Concrete 5 is that no matter what the template, they tend to look alike.

Not quite true: if you use the free templates and don't know what you're doing, then yes they all look the same.

However, local company Polyglot Puppet Theatre uses Drupal on their site. You wouldn't know it because their site has been built by professional web designers, which means a custom template.
http://www.polyglottheatre.com/

Indeed, the template for my own websites are exactly the same. They're both modified versions of a free template available with my content system; and modified in completely different ways. In fact, the original template looks like this:
http://skins.b2evolution.net/two.php/2007/12/07/photoblog

(One of the reasons I love this particular system is that you don't have to know that much code to change things: a basic understanding of CSS and html, which can be learned quite easily, see below link. The system is designed so that I can add or delete blocks of text, 'widgets' and other things, and then all I do is tweak placement or colours)

I would add that although it seems daunting to learn how to edit stuff: that's exactly what I did. I didn't learn from a book, or from a class, or from tutorials (although many online tutorials I did check later on), but mainly by trial and error. If you visit www.w3schools.com, you will find a number of excellent tutorials that teach basic coding skills; with a testing area so you can try it out for yourself.

The reason why most people's sites start to look the same is that they don't want to or can't afford for a 'pro' template. Pro templates tend to be slightly more custom-made, but often template websites just charge for a fancier version of a template that will be seen everywhere. And so people just use the free ones and are limited by either what the template can do or their own coding skills.

This is certainly how I started off, and my templates looked like anyone else's.

As for Joomla, I started off using it, but found it increasing frustrating as there are huge security holes and constant upgrades required, along with everything not working together like it should. It's good for basic stuff; but if you need a shopping cart, go somewhere else. Or a blog for that matter: their extensions for blogs are pretty poor.

Haven't tried Drupal, but have been a moderator of a site that uses it. It looks pretty complex from the backend, but if I had to choose between Joomla and Drupal, I'd go the latter. (Concrete 5 I have vague recollections of hearing...)

I think starting with a CMS (Content Management System) is a good idea for most folks. I think I've used most the major ones out there and even some of my own creation.   I would say that Joomla is easier to use then Drupal for the end user for the most part but both do take some getting used to.

In regards to security something that most folks do not do is keep their installations updated. Updating can be time consuming but if you don't keep up on it it becomes even harder the more updates you miss. When I first started the forums here at PandS I used a program called phpBB which was kind of a pain to upgrade. I ended up switching to SMF because updating was made easy with a simple click in the administration area.

I now use for new sites a frame work called CakePHP but it is not for the beginner. You need to understand PHP to use it since it is just a set of base core files that you use in site. There is actually a CMS based on it called Croogo that gives you all the basics ready to go but it is still in beta phase. This means you really have to keep up on version updates and sometimes a feature may not work as you expect because they are still testing things out.