Calling Any Web Design Savvy Mustachians-Advice Needed!

[cashstasherat23]

Here's the situation:

I graduated with an English degree, and something that has always interested me is career advice/resume writing/LinkedIn profiles, so a while back I put up an ad on Craigslist to rewrite resumes, cover letters and LI profiles, and actually had some great interest. I did a few resumes and made about $150 bucks total, and then as I started a new job that sort of dwindled down. Sparked by one of the old clients reaching out to me again, I am thinking of starting this back up, but as I was searching for going rates today, I happened upon a few websites for resume writing.

In the past I have just communicated with clients via email and taken payments via paypal, but today I started thinking that it might be nice to have my own website where I could advertise my writing services, and also have an order form where people could choose the services they want and pay online.

However, I have NO idea how to go about getting something like this set up. I have used Wordpress before for blogs, but not sure if that is even in the same ballpark of what I would need to set up a system to take order and get payments.

Any advice that people have would be greatly appreciated!

[daverobev]

There are plugins for Paypal I believe, it's very simple to add a button and simple storefront.

[terran]

Self hosted (not wordpress.com) wordpress is a great option. I use it for most sites I build -- some of them quite large.

Stripe is a payment processor kind of like paypal, but it looks like you're just entering your credit card on the site instead of shunting you off to paypal. Stripe still takes on the burden of storing credit card data -- it never hits your server so you aren't responsible for onerous PCI compliance issues.

Woocommerce is a fully fledged ecommerce system built for wordpress that has a (paid) stripe add-on. It might create a system that's a bit of overkill for you, so you could look around for other solutions.  You might be better off with something that doesn't have a full cart system, but rather a direct link from the "product" to a payment page since it's unlikely people will be ordering multiple services at the same time.

With a service based business like this you also may or may not find that actually collecting payment is necessary. You might do just as well with a contact form (or set of contact forms) and taking payment later when you follow up. It could at least be an easier/faster way to start out. Probably worth looking into taking payments down the road assuming you've found you're able to productize your services well enough (ie predict pricing and people's needs with a handful of variations).

The gravity forms wordpress plugin could be a good option for a form that can integrate with stripe payments. It would cost $200 for the version that has stripe integration.