Home Stagers Receive Website Tips from Staging Diva

Although home staging expert Debra Gould is a hands-on entrepreneur, she knows when to get help. Since 1999, Gould has designed and built several of her own websites, but she also hires professional website programmers whenever special projects require it.

Gould says, "There´s nothing wrong with realizing you need help and electing to hire an independent designer to take care of the task for you. It´s great to leave the nuts and bolts of building your site to a competent designer, but keep in mind that you shouldn´t leave every single element of your website to someone else."

According to Gould, founder of the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program, some home stagers allow their website designers to set up and maintain their Google Adwords accounts for them. Unfortunately, these stagers don´t have total control over their spending each month. Not only that, but if these stagers ever parted ways with their web designers, they would lose all their ads, history and tracking.

Gould says it is far better for a home stager to establish an account in her own name and then provide access to the designer. "This way you can be assured that you will always have access to your own information and tracking. The designer can still set up the actual ads and keywords for you, but you´ll control your own ad spending, and you can always cut off the designer´s access if you need to," says Gould.

Many home stagers also allow their designers to register their domain names for them. Gould explains why this isn´t necessary: "Registering your own domain takes less than 5 minutes, costs about $10 and does not require any high-tech knowledge. Do it yourself so that you always have ownership and control of your domain."

Web designers may also offer to provide hosting for home staging websites, but Gould advises stagers to ask questions before agreeing to this. For instance, if the designer hosts his clients´ websites on a server in his basement, he should have a backup plan in case his basement floods or the server goes down while he´s away on a two-week vacation.

"I highly recommend you maintain your own website hosting account with a major company and not go through a third party. What if you fire the designer because he does a terrible job with your site, and then he takes down your site altogether? Essentially, it all boils down to trust. If your website designer offers to handle your hosting and Google AdWords accounts, be sure you can trust them before you agree to any arrangement," Gould warns.

Many home stagers become overwhelmed when it comes to dealing with domains, hosting, and Adwords, so Gould makes herself available for one-on-one business coaching about these and other topics. She also offers a Home Staging Website CheckUp service to help stagers improve their images on the web. Stagers can book appointments for both services on the Staging Diva website.

About Staging Diva

The creator of the Staging Diva Home Staging Business Training Program, Debra Gould has staged millions of dollars worth of real estate, including seven of her own homes. She is the president of home staging firm SixElements.com and has trained over 4000 home stagers to start and grow their own businesses.

Debra has gained international recognition through features in major media in the US and Canada including: This Old House, HGTV, CNN Money, CBC National News, CBS Radio, Global TV, City TV, The Wall Street Journal, Women´s Day, Reader´s Digest and more.