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Start-Up Advice For Single Mums

Each week in our BNI lunchtime meeting, I am expected to get up and tell other members and visitors a little bit about my work in a sixty second snapshot.

If you want to find out a bit more about our weekly meetings, skip to the bottom of this page.

Here's what I had to say this week:

"My name is Jon Ewing and I'm from inframes.com ltd in Reading, a design and development company that builds websites for businesses.

"You should refer business to me because I have been making websites for 15 years and I am starting to get quite good at it.



"The school holidays are coming to an end and it's no coincidence that last week I was giving some advice to a single mother who is looking to start up her own business selling children's clothes online.

"I was able to talk her through some of the intricacies of setting up an ecommerce business and gave her a ballpark figure of around £500 + VAT for the initial design and devlopment plus ongoing monthly fees of £29.99 + VAT for hosting. For that, she'll get a fully-working virtual business.

"So this week, as mums around the country get a little free time to contemplate the future after two months of full-time parenting, my ideal referral would be a single mother who is ready for the challenge of starting her own web-based business in 2011 and doesn't know where to begin.

"To find out how good your website could be, look into inframes."

Further Reading

What exactly would that £500 + VAT buy you? Suffice to say, it's everything you need to start selling online:

• Your website (designed from scratch - we never use templates)


• Unlimited email


• A database (to store all your products and orders and to organise those products into categories)


• Your customers will get a "shopping basket" with a checkout system that will allow you to take credit card payments


• A back-end admin system (to upload images, add, edit and delete products with different size and colour permutations)


• The facility to view and manage orders and print out dispatch notes


• A customer relationship management system which will allow people to log on and check the status of their orders (awaiting dispatch etc)

And of course, that's just an example, because at inframes we never make the same website twice and every job is tailored to the needs of the business.


What's BNI?

I am part of a growing new chapter of the BNI business networking group and we're looking for other Reading-based small business professionals to refer business to.

We meet between 12.15pm and 1.45pm on Wednesdays. If you'd like to come along to a lunch, please drop me a line or give me a call and I'll put you in touch with our organiser.

There's absolutely no commitment required – you just pay a tenner, which covers the cost of lunch at the Strada on the Oracle Riverside - and you'll have a chance to meet existing members and other visitors, introduce your business and of course hand out business cards.