Hi Paul,

I originally designed and built my own site using a combination of dreamweaver and a few html templates that I downloaded from the internet and adapted.

In Jan of this year though, we contacted a professional designer to do a re-design (see www.carworksni.com).

The site isn't finished yet by any means, but the basic structure is there so that we can add info as needed.

The designer used a package called Joomla to implement the site, which means that the site itself is content-managed. This means that he did the initial design and provided us with placeholders for relevant info, but we are able to log in at any point to the "back-end" of the site and add to/make changes to the content on the site.

This is a good compromise if you want a good slick website i.e. get it initially designed professionally, but make sure that you aren't paying for every little tweak/change in text that would would like in the future.

We have invested quite a bit of time registering the site with Google Adwords (specifically for the Northern Ireland region.) We get charged monthly for this advertising, but are finding that we are getting a fair proportion of new customers from this method of advertising.

All the best with the new site!

Martina