Hi there,



Just thought I'd start by saying that I love the start-up's website, I’ve found it to be an invaluable source of advice and information, so thanks to those that have got this site up and running. I've just joined the forum as I’ve had a dig around start-ups and around the net in general to see if I can get some answers, but have been unable to get any to a couple of things I am confused about.



I plan to set up some face to face meetings in the next couple of weeks to help clarify a few issues with regard to getting my business set-up, however I thought I'd see if anyone on here can give me a bit of a head start.



I'm in the early stages of getting set-up as a sole trader doing freelance web work. I will be offering a range of services including, custom design/development, domain registration, template based builds, and web hosting amongst a few others. Obviously the services overlap a lot, but I would also like to offer some of them separately as well, chiefly by having slightly different company names, different web sites, and different invoices etc, for example having the hosting/domain registration separate from the design/development.



I was wondering if this is a really bad idea that is going to cause me a lot of complications. It's just that I feel by offering some of my services in this manner it will help to create a more professional perception of my company. For example I want to offer hosting with my design and development, but I also don’t want to exclude potential customers who only have a need for hosting, so to aid this I want to have the hosting side of things offered on its own site, centred around a name that includes the word hosting, but I don't want to offer my design and development services from solely from there as in my opinion I think it looks less professional when you sell design and development services through a site/company that appears to deal with hosting.



I see the self employed HMRCs forms are obviously geared towards setting up one business so could I do it by having a sort of catch all company name such as Mark's Solutions and then operating my separate services under the names I want such as Mark's Design, Mark's Hosting etc, so that all invoices and money etc go through the Solutions name, but I can still create an individual identity for my separate services, or would that be recommended against for any reason?



Is there indeed any problem with me being officially registered with HMRCs as having a business name of Mark's Solutions but then going around giving out business cards with Mark's Design, and others with Mark's Hosting on?





As you can tell I am a little confused on this particular subject so hopefully it makes sense what I am trying to do, so any help or pointing in the right direction would be much appreciated!



Thanks for your time,



Mark