By setting up a presence on the Internet, your potential customers could look through all your samples at their own leisure before they pick up the phone to meet with you. They would know, for instance, before they call that you are the faux finisher they want for that special "Old World Stone" finish.



In addition, your customers would be able to read testimonials from past clients to discover how talented you are. They would also be able to read about your skills and training to get to know you as a professional artist. You could essentially pre-sell your client before you ever meet them!

Your website should reflect the mood, style and design you've used in all your marketing pieces. So make sure before you begin that you chart out exactly how you'd like it to look and the information you want to include.

Depending upon your website skills, you can either setup your website yourself or hire a website designer to do it for you. If you have the expertise you can use website development software such as FrontPage or Dreamweaver to create your site. There are also templates available through sites such as godaddy.com that offer quick and easy methods of setting up a website.

Shop around online for a website designer if you're looking for someone to design an especially creative website for you. Just be sure to look at other sites the designer has created to make certain that they're the perfect person to design your site.

If you're on a tight budget, another option is to use an online photo site to create a unique portfolio of your photos. Most of them are inexpensive to use and only cost about $20 a year to use. The are very easy to use; simply upload your photos, select an album and you're pretty much ready to go.

Whichever method you decide to use, make sure you include your web address on all your advertising pieces. So every display ad, sales letter and business card should show your domain name so that people can check out your work.

You could also send out a press release to your local paper announcing something new about your business and mention the website along with your phone number in the resource section at the end. This would generate a lot of hits to your site.

I don't recommend you waste money promoting your business online using pay per clicks, online classifieds or other such advertising as you don't want to promote your business globally. Your advertising money would be better spent getting listed in local business directories or chamber of commerce listings, both online and offline. However, it wouldn't hurt to submit your URL to the free search engines such as Google and Yahoo.

As you can see, setting up a website for your faux finish business doesn't have to be a complicated endeavor and there's an online solution for every budget.