User Experience

If you are going to use Social Media Marketing. I would recommend you create a Pinterest wall of your work and back link them to your site. Try that.

Go for Wordpress initially. -- Custom website will delay your launch plans considering all factors. -- Wordpress can be used to meet your requirements from day 1. -- Once you have enough visitors and decided the revenue model + business objective plan for a customized website to be developed from scratch.

The best technology is whatever gets you up and running the quickest. You'll throw away the first iteration (and possibly the second and third...) anyway. What you need most in the beginning is to test your idea and get feedback, and you need it fast.

I've done a lot of complex analytics installations, usually cross-domain and including AdWords and manual tagging with conversion tracking of ecommerce transactions. The gclid by default will override the manual UTM values in Analytics so that is what you are looking for. If you are just grabbing the manual tags from the URL for your own purpose, this should be OK. However, if you at some point want to import conversions (say) connected to your manual tag, then you would want to enable UTM overriding the gclid: https://support.google.com/analytics/answer/1033981?hl=en. Do you have AdWords and Analytics accounts linked? Where and how are you tracking commerce conversions, if you are? Do you feel you are getting the insights you need from your current custom reporting? Let me know if I can help with a call about those or further optimization of your analytics capture. Best - Michael

I consult with clients who are looking for the right outsourcing situation all the time, and the best way to get started is to figure out what kind of outsourcing partner will be the best 'fit' for your needs. After that, it's easy to find out where that type of outsourcing partner/contractor/freelance hangs out and pick a winner. Try writing up some notes about things like: 1) You mentioned you had a small budget - how small? If your budget is $1500 your options are going to be very different than if it's $25,000. Both of those could be considered 'small budgets' in the right context, so try to put a number out there. 2) You also mentioned that you wanted 'good quality, clean code'. What does this mean and are you willing to pay for that? If you are building an MVP and are really short on funds, you might have to use a less senior developer/team and take the risk of getting sloppier code - but sometimes with an MVP that's ok! If you are building a production app, that's a different story. 3) What is your technical and management expertise? Can you create specifications and manage a developer on your own (not easy to do)? If so, you can save money by using a freelancer, etc. If you are very non-technical and will need PM support, you might consider a small group or agency. 4) What does 'website development' involve, in your vision? Design? Copywriting? QA? Server migration and admin? ui/ux? 5) What is your tolerance for going offshore? You will hear lots of people saying that offshore teams all suck, and lots of people saying that they did it and it went fine. Like most software projects, there is a high failure rate but lots of success with offshore. You can save a ton of money, but you can also take a bath so you need to consider whether you are up to the challenge or not - going offshore takes much more patience, attention, documentation, etc. but it can work. 6) What are the skills/tech that you will need? It's best to get a team that is great at the skills you need. If you want a ruby site, hire a ruby shop. If you want a augmented reality site, find a team that is great at that. Watch out for the generalists :) By thinking through questions like the above, you can change your statement from "Where do you go for outsourcing website development" to something like this: "I am looking for an outsourcing partner who would be interested in a 15k-20k project that will be build in python. This application will be evolved into our production app so the quality must be good. I am a good project manager and will work with the developer on the requirements/spec side, and help test. We will need application/db design and development, server administration, and technical support but all design, content, copy, ui/ux will be provided. We will consider offshore teams but you must have excellent spoken english." When you expand your 'what we're looking for' paragraph, the whole search for outsourcing partner gets much easier! If you like, feel free to give me a call and share your 'vendor profile' with me and I can help point you in the right direction.