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Action: Put together a support team to help you. Here's how: 1) Find a good techie to help with advanced computer stuff. 2) Find a talented graphic designer. 3) Find a webmaster, unless you plan to do everything yourself! 4) Find a great CGI/PHP person. 5) Get help with your daily customer support and service. 6) Check out these key resources! |
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Support Team Action: Put together a support team to help you You can't do everything yourself. Nor would you want to. You're going to need a lot of help along the way. Here's how to get that help.
I talk about this under the design step. If you're on a really slim budget, you can learn to do graphics yourself. It's amazing what a little ingenuity and paint.net or Photoshop Elements can do for you. That's why I taught how to use Photoshop Elements (the basics) in Design Dashboard. Plus, learning to do that prepares you to use full-blown Photoshop later on. I've seen people knock out really amazing sites using Optimize Press (aff link), which is a theme for Wordpress. But you'll still need to have a graphic header designed or do it yourself. I do not recommend that you do your own graphics. If you have 10 or 15 bucks. SOME of these designers will knock it out of the park for you. I recommend you hire someone who is a professional. Here's a list of designers with varying prices -- some of them dirt cheap with very high quality work: http://www.crystalprocovers.com/
You may need html help. Trying to figure out why your form isn't submitting data or your popup isn't popping up can get very frustrating. You're going to want to find someone who can help you with all the technical details. I recommend you use Elance.com to find someone. To get someone to help you out part or full-time for as little as $100-$250 a month, try onlinejobs.php. You do NOT need to spend this to START. If you're on a BUDGET, you can probably get the help you need on FIVERR.COM for 5 bucks.
You're going to want to have programs installed on your web server. For example, you'll want help desk software installed. Perhaps a tell-a-friend script. And other things. To do this, you're going to need an expert to help you. You're going to need an expert in PHP/mysql if you use a unix server. Or if you use a windows server, you'll need an expert in ASP. Personally, I use and recommend a unix server. Where do you find help? I recommend http://www.rentacoder.com and http://www.elance.com. As I mentioned earlier, my current favorite is scriptlance.com. If you need to hire someone full time try onlinejobs.ph. You can hire professionals from all around the world at great prices. For example, some of my friends have had excellent success with programmers in Russia. For programming jobs I've really had better success with RentaCoder so I'd post a project there first if I needed any software created. For administrative tasks, Elance has worked out pretty well for me. But in addition to that you can always post an ad in your local paper under the HELP WANTED section and see if you can find someone locally. The only drawback with that is that you're going to end up paying a higher rate than if you'd have posted a project online, but the pay off is that you would be able to work hand in hand with the person, versus having to correspond halfway across the world or country, as you do when you hire someone online.
Once your business gets rolling, you'll want to get someone to handle customer service for you. I recommend Elance.com for finding help with this. In the beginning you can handle your own customer service but as you get busier you'll want to spend your time working on new products. At that point in time you will need someone to handle your email, live chats and support tickets, if applicable. |
