Hats off to those of you who aren’t website experts and recognize you don’t have the skill set required to design your own effective 
home staging website. There’s nothing wrong with realizing you need help and electing to hire an independent designer to take care of the task for you.
While it’s great to leave the nuts and bolts of building your site to a designer who knows what they’re doing, you shouldn’t necessarily leave every single element of your website to someone else.
If your website designer, for example, offers to set up and maintain a Google AdWords account for you, don’t agree to that. Instead, establish your own account in your own name, and then give them access to it.
This way you can be assured that you will always have access to your own information and tracking. The designer can still do all the set up of the actual ads, keywords, etc. for you, but you’ll control your own ad spending and you can always cut of the designer’s access if you need to.
If they set up the AdWords account in their name, then you lose all your ads, history and tracking if you ever part ways. Plus, you don’t have total control over your spending each month. I don’t know about you, but that would make me very uncomfortable!
There are also many website designers who may offer to register your domain for you and set up hosting services for your home staging website.
Registering your own domain takes less than 5 minutes, costs about $10 and does not require any high tech knowledge. Do it yourself so that you always have ownership and control of your domain.
Before you jump at the opportunity to have your website hosted by your designer, ask some questions. For instance, if he has his own server in his basement, you need to know what sort of backup plan he has in case his basement floods or it goes down while he’s gone on vacation for a week.
I highly recommend you maintain your own website hosting account with a major company and not to go through a third party. If your designer and you end up having a big falling out, what happens then? What if the designer ends up doing a terrible job with your site and you fire him so he takes your site down all together? (This can happen if he controls your domain and/or the hosting of your website.)
What all of this boils down to is that if your website designer offers to handle your hosting and Google AdWords accounts be sure you can trust them – a lot – before you agree to any arrangement.
If you don’t know enough about all of this to know what questions you should be asking your designer, remember you can always book a coaching call with me and I can help you determine what to do about all of these different aspects of your home staging website.
If you’re a Staging Diva Graduate, you can also join the Staging Diva Network Online Discussion Group or our monthly semi-private Staging Diva Dialog coaching calls. We meet on the third Thursday of every month. If you’re registered you can attend live with me, ask anything you like and have a recording of the call sent to you right after the event.
Have you run into any issues because you trusted the wrong person with your home staging website?
Debra Gould, The Staging Diva®
President, Six Elements Inc. Home Staging
Debra Gould has been building her own websites since 1999. She knows how to make money as a home stager and she developed the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program to teach others how to earn a living doing something they love. There are more than 4000 Staging Diva Students in the U.S., Canada and 20 other countries. Debra is frequently profiled in the media for her home staging expertise and is the author of 5 guides for home stagers.
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- Home Stagers, do you know how long it takes Google to find you?
- Home staging website – does yours perform?
- Home stagers, how’s the health of your website?
- Do your home staging rates belong on your website?
- Home staging website SixElements.com has a brand new look
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Hi Debra!
Great post for any of us graduates that are having websites designed as we launch home staging businesses everywhere. I appreciate so much that you alert us about the things we need to consider in order to be in control of the businesses we build and the few dollars we have when starting out. I first began to learn these important pieces of information from you during monthly Diva Dialog calls! At first it was difficult for me to understand but the things you said inspired me to do more research on my own. Because of those valuable calls and conversations, I’ve come to know that I do not have the time or desire to figure out web site construction, or search engine optimization. This fact alone has saved me money! Hats off to you for being skilled in this area as well! You’ve continued to encourage us to have a web presence; both on the Directory of Home Staging Diva Graduates and through our own websites, and because you have continued to educate us about web site design, white hat and black hat web design practices, the business intelligence behind Search Engine Optimization, owning and registering our own domains and ensuring we have a safe, trustworthy and legitimate hosting service I feel very prepared as I work with setting up the design of my own web site. THANK YOU! So far I have been able to ask the right questions and demand satisfactory responses to my inquires so I can lead the development of my website and know how to proceed with regard to changes to my site, my online ads, hosting, and my domain. I appreciate your alerts and insights.
Stacy, you are most welcome! And congratulations to you for being such a diligent student and diving into all these intimidating topics.
I’m constantly learning in this field too because it’s always changing. As I continue to invest in my own Internet-related education, I try to bring my students the highlights in as little technical jargon as possible (though some knowledge of the terms will help you as you deal with third parties).
I look forward to seeing what you come up with for your site!