Hello from Bill the horse guy from Montana USA

[Ryder]

Hello one and all. I make horses amoung other things here in Helena montana. I have been pursuing metal sculpture for the last few years and really enjoy it. I am interested in learning more about marketing and shipping of big pieces and would like to teach others simple welding and fabrication. I also can show others how to put up a simple web site that starts out free and goes all the way up to $100US a year. Very simple "what you see is what you get" website building.....my wifes site has gotten 20K hits in less than a year with no paid advertising.
http://www.ryderhorses.com/

[raspero]

Fastenal, the industrial supply house, (they have a branch in Helena) is also registered as a common carrier. They wanted to make some use of their trucks that were empty after deliveries to their branches. They ship stuff for people. You have to wait for an available truck, and they don't pack or pick up; it needs to be secured on a pallet for handling by a forklift. They are much cheaper than a trucking company. I hear that some of the people in some branches don't know much, if anything, about it, but you can contact the head office.

Richard

[The Forge]

Great looking work.

[Art-Deco]

Originally Posted by Ryder

.my wifes site has gotten 20K hits in less than a year with no paid advertising.

Hi,
What are you defining as "hits" exactly?

"hits" is a very misleading term I see all over the place, it doesn't mean much at all since every page loading and every image on the page is a "hit" so if you have someone accidentally hit your page that has loads of photos and things on it, it all goes in the stats as "hits." Getting hit by spam bots also adds to "hits" but provides useless traffic that will never buy something.
The "Unique visitors" column is the one that is the most important stats, it shows how many individual visits there were.

Here's an example of my stats on a brand new domain and web site, you can see immediately after putting them up in August the awstats show almost 1,500 "hits" just that month alone, with no advertising at all, not even embedded into google search engine then since both the domain and the web site were brand new.



Here's another web site of mine, I dont pay for advertising, I don't make any effort to go out an advertise it either, but it's easy to see it gets at least 25k "hits" a month, this one was moved to a new host mid-year:

[Ryder]

Great info, yes unique visitors are a lower number. We are not in the buisness of setting up web sites and are thrilled when a number of folks from around the states and world look at our info or photos. Maybe this comes from living in a town of 28K which is the state capital of a large state that just recently reached a million residents. I also consider ease of starting and maintaining a web site that only cost $50.00 a year a real plus.

[vonfrese]

How does one make a website which has a shopping cart so people can purchase something?

By the way i love your work. I just got a new Lincoln welder and have a big pile of scrap metal so I will try to do some things when spring hits. I'm in Missouri and have a studio on a river bank so if it does not flood I can work.

Vince

[mantrid]

You either buy a ready made package or use a free service or write the code for a web store yourself

[GarryRicketson]

Kind of a old post, but I do like the horses, I just did my first one on stone, but that is another subject. I have always like horses, and occasionally had one.

[Ryder]

http://missoulian.com/news/state-and...19bb2963f4.htm

Your horse reminds me of this wild horse who recently finished his life this time around.

My next commission is a tribute sculpture for a horse that had to be put down.