W04 Reflection

 This week we talked about picking a site builder and a host. At first this was confusing for me because I wasn't sure what the difference was. But now I understand that a site builder is just what allows you to create and customize a website, but the host is what actually stores the data and allows your content to be accessible on the internet. Brother Scott used the example of the land you build a house on being the host, and the actual building being the website. I think one of the confusing thing is that many hosts also offer site building options, and lots of site builders have hosting included. 

I researched quite a few options, including Wix, Weebly, Uphost, Bluehost, Wordpress, Ionos, Namecheap, and Hostinger. I compared various components, including the price, the minimum time commitment, the features and flexibility, and ease of use. In general, I found that those that had the best capacity and widest variety of features were also the ones that cost more. Which makes sense. Weebly and Ionos were both noted as being very user-friendly and good for beginners, but also having more limited template options than sites like Wix or Hostinger. Wix and Weebly are both site builder/host combos, so if I used one of those I wouldn't need a separate host. Right now I'm between Weebly and Ionos, depending on whether or not I need to accept online payments.

The other assignment we did this week was the business brainstorming excel sheet. That was a very in depth comparison of all my different business ideas from an objective standpoint. I liked how detailed it was and how many options it considered. However, it was very aggravating to work on because it was designed to have the criteria of "monthly clicks," "impressions" and "cost."  However, the Google Ads Keyword planner does not have those categories. It has "avg. monthly searches" and "low end bid" and "high end bid." So for those numbers I had to do some calculating to figure it out. I used average monthly searches for the impressions, and did the average of the high end and low end bids for the cost. The clicks was a little trickier, but I looked it up and found out that clicks can be estimated by multiplying the impressions by the average "CTR" which is the click through rate for that type of keyword. I looked up the average CTRs for the types of search intentions I was using, and then used AI to calculate clicks based on the impressions I had. I don't know if there is an easier tool for doing that, or if I'm just missing something on Keyword Planner that I should've been using, but hopefully those estimates still give me a general idea of what business ideas would be the best. 

My top five ideas turned out to be

1. photography portfolio/service

2. product review website

3. historical fashion blog

4. selling vintage ads

5. website to share my music

Of these, I picked a product review website because it seems like it would be the easiest to actually accomplish. But because the sheet took me so long (despite starting on it weeks ago), I was pretty tired by the time I finished. So I think I'll review all the numbers and the ratings I put for everything and I might adjust my choice before I actually make the website.

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