Websites are one of many online options

(image credit)

After about six months of messing with a Wordpress template, I called it quits this week. No matter what I did, I couldn't get the site to look the way I wanted it to look.

I then had one of those "light bulb over the head" moments when I realized I didn't need to go with the traditional photographer web site. Duh. Once I realized that, I managed to find a new website template in under a half an hour that actually worked and looked great.

Reference: Melissa Bagley.

Melissa Bagley is a professional photographer, and while we don't know yet what she's come up with, I'm sure that many of us small-business owners can relate to her story.  We simply don't have the budget to engage a skilled but pricey designer, so we have to rely on our persistence and ingenuity.

Lacking resources has made me more resourceful.

I attended a talk recently, which, even though it wasn't so clear at first, was about online marketing.  The focus was on websites as a primary home for us business and marketing people.  But in reality websites are just one of many options we have at our disposal.

I've had more than my fair share of incompetent, unscrupulous website designers, but perhaps like Bagley, it dawned on me that I could create my own websites and therefore dispense with all of these clowns.  This way, I had full control over its design and functionality, and it fit my shoestring budget perfectly.

That said, my websites are not the center of my online presence and projects: Social media is, especially Google+ and Twitter.  My websites are an entry for my management consultancy, and it's on my business card.  But I've created a network around it and with it, which also includes Blogger, Tumblr and Pinterest, plus About.Me.

For your reference, here are my websites: Ron Villejo Consulting, Dr. Ron Art, and T'ai Chi Empower.