Most people know GoDaddy as the place to buy a domain name for their website. GoDaddy is where many people start when they want a website.
GoDaddy also offers a complete online package for people and businesses. They have a website builder called GoCentral. They also offer you a personal email address tied to your domain name. So if the domain name you just purchased from GoDaddy is www.MySuperCoolHomeStagingCompany.com, then you can have an email address that looks like [email protected]. GoDaddy is a convenient one stop shopping experience.
From the time you get on the GoDaddy website, it can be as little as an hour to get a domain name, an email address, and create a very basic website that you would be able to launch onto the internet. That is an extremely valuable selling point of GoDaddy.
Of course, with all of this ease, there are some drawbacks.
Why GoCentral is Good
We mentioned that the greatest selling point of GoDaddy is to have a one stop shop. One company to work with, one bill, and you know everything is integrated. And you can have your website on the internet in a very short amount of time. There are many other reasons that GoCentral is a good product for building a website.
Hosting is Included
GoDaddy hosts your website and email, which means that you don’t even need to learn what the word “hosting” means, let alone purchase it and configure it yourself. It’s not the best hosting, but it is enough for a simple website that doesn’t get many visitors.
Ease of Use
GoCentral is extremely user friendly. It will initially ask you some questions to get your website started and provide configurations that make sense for you and your business. Then adding sections, text, and some pictures is very easy. You can even create a page to talk about the services you offer, an About Me page, and other pages if you want them.
Customer Support
Since everything for your website is housed in one place, having your domain name, website, and email makes customer support easy. They know how everything works and integrates and can help with any website related problem you have.
Where GoCentral has limitations
If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is. GoCentral is a good solution, but probably not the perfect solution for most home stagers.
Limited Design Flexibility
GoCentral includes a variety of templates for you to choose for the overall layout of your website. Unfortunately, those templates aren’t very customizable, and changing templates isn’t a seamless process at this point.
SEO Utility is Misleading
Within the GoCentral builder is a section for SEO (search engine optimization). This section prompts you to enter some information, which is the bare minimum every website should have, and not really helping your website’s SEO. Additionally, there is a tool to “Improve Ranking” of your website that claims it will improve your website’s SEO. From what we have seen with this function is that it asks for a little be more of the bare minimum that every website should have. Unfortunately, SEO is frequently misunderstood, and GoCentral may be providing a false sense of security. SEO is much more complex than entering a few keywords when GoDaddy asks for them.
No Blog
If you want your website to have good SEO, then having a blog is very important. Google likes websites with good blogs. Blogs show that the website is an authority in your industry, prove that your website is regularly updated, provide a significant volume of your most important keywords, and allow Google to build a story of what your website is about. But GoCentral doesn’t let you have a blog. This, in my opinion, is a deal killer for someone who wants their website to get found on Google.
Limited Portfolio Flexibility
Most home stagers have a hard drive full of pictures from their home staging projects. Ideally, you would be able to create a project for different staging jobs that you have done, different types of properties, or different types of staging. For example, if you staged a condo with the owner’s furniture one week, and a vacant luxury home the next week, you wouldn’t want to lump all of those pictures together onto one portfolio page of your website. A potential luxury home client would only want to see examples of projects you’ve done that fits their needs, not the needs of someone who has a condo. But GoCentral doesn’t have a way to separate your pictures into projects without creating separate pages for them, causing your website to be difficult to navigate.
No Title Tags or Alt Tags on Pictures
You might not know what these are now, but they are extremely important for SEO on any website that has pictures. These tags tell Google what all those pretty colors are actually a picture of. GoCentral doesn’t allow you to add title or alt tags to your pictures, therefor negating the SEO benefit that your pictures should be able to provide.
GoCentral is Proprietary
Your website on GoCentral works only on GoCentral. Your website can’t be exported outside of GoDaddy. We work with a lot of customers who had their websites built on GoDaddy, and we rebuilt their website from scratch.
When to use GoCentral
GoCentral clearly has limitations, but that doesn’t mean that home stager’s shouldn’t use it. Yes, you heard that right, we actually do recommend GoCentral! So when should a home stager use GoCentral?
All home stagers know that they need a website for your business, but many don’t really know where to start. You can spend hours and days trying to figure out how to get one. You’ve heard of Wix, but what is it? You’ve seen commercials for Squarespace, but is it something that you can use? The neighbor’s kid in high school makes websites, and he said he can make one for you, but can you trust him to do it right? What is WordPress? What is hosting? What are plugins? It’s enough to make your head spin!!
If you are in that situation, go to GoCentral now! Get your domain name. Start using GoCentral. Make a quick website using their easy to use website builder, and hit the Publish button to get it on the internet.
GoCentral is a great way to make a website quickly. You can put your domain name on your business cards, on your Houzz profile, on your RESA profile page, in your social media accounts, and in your email signature. Basically, let people know your have a website, because you should not expect it to show up on Google. Ever. No matter how many keywords you enter into GoCentral.
Trust me, you will feel a lot better having a website published on the internet.
Now that your starter website is live, you have time to actually figure out how to get a real website. You might find that you can make a great website with GoCentral and stay with it. Or you might find that your neighbor’s kid is a website superstar. Or a colleague finally recommends their website developer. Or you can contact Stager Sidekick (shameless plug) to let us make your website for you.
Your new website can be made using the domain name you purchased from GoDaddy. The transfer of your domain name to a new custom website is really simple for someone who knows what they’re doing.
Final Thoughts on GoCentral from GoDaddy for Home Stagers
GoCentral serves a purpose for many home stagers who need a website. It is an easy way to get a website launched, and will be sufficient for a while if you don’t need much.
Imagine you are really hungry for dinner. GoDaddy is like a vending machine. If you’re standing next to the GoDaddy vending machine, for under $3 you can make a meal out of a bottle of juice, bag of chips, and a candy bar for dessert. That vending machine is easy and it will technically get the job done, but you can’t survive doing that every day.
Now that your belly is full, you have time to plan out a real dinner for tomorrow. Instead of using the vending machine, you have to drive to the supermarket to get the ingredients to make a whole dinner, and maybe even a larger size bag of chips.
Getting your website built by a website developer is the supermarket. Your website will be higher quality, will be able to have more variety and functionality, and you will be happy eating it every night for dinner…or something like that.
