Blogging for Repair Shops: Frequently Asked Questions

What’s the first thing I should know before creating a website or blog?

If you’re unsure about many things such as design, colors, name, etc, building a website might take a little time. Which is why suggest you talk to your staff and tell them your plans of having online presence. If everyone provides ideas and their insight we bet in no time you’ll have a good understanding of what you want your site to look like. Once you have that, we recommend you start to look into names for a website. I know what you’re thinking, the name of your shop, right? True but many repair shops share names which is why before you have your mind set on a specific name for a website, we recommend you browse godaddy.com and search to see what domain names are available. Who knows, maybe the name of your shop is not taken and you can purchase it. 

What’s the difference between a website and a blog?

To make a long story short, website is the generic term. All blogs are websites but not all websites are blogs (web log = blog). Blogs have a section where visitors may comment, blogs are updated more frequently, they cover a wider variety of articles, blogs are like newspapers (they cover various topics while websites tend to stick to one subject). You want a blog because it allows for more interaction with your visitors. You want to have a section where you can upload articles and have people share the ones they deem interesting on social media.

How does hosting work and why do I have to pay for it?

Purchasing a domain is basically like buying a house but online. The domain has to be paid for once but every year you have to pay to keep it. Browse through godaddy.com and see for yourself. You can purchase a domain for as little as $10 and hosting can be purchased for $10 per month so it’s not exactly going to be a big investment. Anyway, think of hosting as rent or a mortgage. You bought your name but you basically need to pay the internet for allowing you to have your very own part of the online world.

What’s the difference between .com, .edu and .org?

These are all suffixes of what the business you own actually is. Com being company, org being organization and edu being of course an educational institution or university.

How much does it cost to have a website?

As we mentioned earlier, the price for your domain and hosting varies but the price of actually building a website is similar to buying a car. Depending on where you have it designed and bells and whistles you want on it is how you’ll determine the overall price of having an up and running site. It all requires coding so the more complex, the more expensive it is. Most auto repair websites just have a basic homepage with a logo, 4-5 menu options, a contact us page and a get a quote form. Contact us if you wish to learn more about pricing as our team of graphic designers and programmers also build websites.

What is Wordpress?

If you’ve browsed the web and researched building a website you’ve probably heard of something called Wordpress. For those of you that haven’t, Wordpress is a content management system (or CMS) which is basically the system we will use to do everything on our site. There are a few popular content management systems out there but Wordpress seems to garner most of the praise due to its user-friendliness.