Hi Sherrie,

What's your purpose for completing your web site before you start your practice? I presume that it's to establish a web presence and to market your hypnotherapy services. It can take a considerable period of time for a new site to propagate on the internet. It could take weeks or even months and you could invest a considerable amount of time and spend a small fortune in trying to optimise your site. This is probably why you feel the need to outsource.

There's an effective alternative that you may consider for now. By effective I mean you can establish an internet presence to market your services without the expense of setting up a website. The alternative is to establish BLOGS in the many Social Networks ie myspace.com etc. When you have established you blogs what you need to do is start linking to authority hypnosis sites that have a google page rank of 4 or more. Also, link you blogs to each other.
www.martinkielyhypnosis.c...

I forgot to mention that setting up the blogs are FREE. You should have the content re: your hypnotherapy practice for the blogs already on your PC. Once you have registered on a number of Social Networks all you need to do is copy and paste the content.

The authority hypnosis sites to link to may require some research but they are there. In the meantime focus your energy on getting your practice established. Build your confidence and hypnotic competence. Develop your practice as you progress. You don't have to have everything established before you start. As the ad states, Just Do It!

Best of luck.

The problem with relying solely on social networking sites like MySpace etc (even this very useful one that the Banyan folks setup) is that, IMO, they are not really intended for use as primary business sites. For one thing, there is uncontrolled third-party advertising on these sites, as well as less control in general over content since this is all about networking after all.

I agree very much with the point about setting up a blog instead of building a custom site, but I suggest an alternative would be signing up for a free blog at Wordpress.org. Buy a domain name for $9, pick one of the hundreds of very professional templates, and you're done.

Nothing against web designers, except that websites are a commodity now. IMO, it makes no sense for a small business to pay someone (in both time and money) to develop a custom website when most small businesses just use their sites as brochureware.

Also, relying on custom web development leads to the small business owner becoming very dependent on that designer as he/she holds the key to getting updates done, access to the server, etc. Totally unnecessary for most businesses, who could accomplish exactly the same thing in less time for free, using something like Wordpress.

Most custom websites I have seen are less professional than the average free Wordpress template. And the above-average Wordpress templates are completely adequate almost all of the time, and if not they can be tweaked by a more technical person.

Also, I would not start linking to popular authority sites with the goal of increasing your site's page rank. While this is a nice thing to do for your human readers, this will actually have opposite effect (esp. if you do not receive reciprocal links) and lower your page ranking, because your site does not benefit from who you link to, it only benefits from who links to you. Therefore one-way linking to many external sites will actually bleed page-rank away from your site!

Also, while it is a good idea to setup sites on different social networks and blogs, you should "funnel" the links on these sites to a single site or page that is most important to your business; having them all link to each other will spread your page-rank around and dilute any benefit.

Hope this helps! Using these techniques, I have been able to get to #1 Google page rank for my local area and search term "hypnosis" (not bad for 5th largest metro area in US!)

Here is a site with addtl info about this subject:
tinyurl.com/4zl8q

I concur with Steve. In my haste in writing I neglected a number of important points that Steve makes above about linking and optimisation. I didn't elaborate my point in writing but there's a link to a video in my first comment that may have been overseen. Check above and view the video. Setting up a Wordpress Blog is an excellent place to start and then have all your Social Networking Blog links pointing to your Wordpress Blog.

Sherrie, the more energy you invest into internet marketing the more you'll be drawn from your initial goal, which is to start practicing hypnosis. At this stage you need to discipline yourself and focus on starting your practice. Get practice momentum established while considering the marketing possibilities as you advance. Hiring a web designer at this point may be an unnessary expense.

Sherrie,
I just read this blog. If you still need a web master I can recommend Kolleen Powers. I don't know if she can work within Microsoft Web Expression but you can ask her. Her website is www.power-site.com She's affordable and efficient.