Q: What do I need, or need to know, to start my website?
A: Your current and future goals and objectives.
• Your initial budget.
• A registered domain name (www.mycompany.com).
• Your company logo.
• Company business information and history.
• Company contact information (names, addresses, phone numbers, emails).
• Existing marketing materials such as brochures, flyers, sales letters, etc.
• A descriptive list of your products and/or services.
• A price list of your products or services.
• Digital photos of products, equipment, personnel, buildings, etc. that you may want to incorporate in your website.
• Any information pertaining to corporate memberships, certifications, licenses, awards, etc.
• Any ideas you may have related to your website's layout, color scheme, functionality, etc.
• A designated internal contact person who will gather required information, approve mock-ups and proofs, and guide the developer during the development and implementation phases.
Q: How long does it take to develop a website?
A: Because every website is different, development and implementation time frames are outlined within our written proposals. You also have a direct affect on the development time and delivery dates because we count on you to provide us with required information and approvals on a timely basis. Delays in providing this information and changes in website content are normal and should be expected in every website project. Because of this, a typical guideline for an Informational or Marketing website is 2-4 weeks.
Q: How can I update my website content?
A: There are two ways to do this:
1) If you have a website that requires very little changing from time to time, then your developer could do this for you very economically. Most changes require an hour or two or even less, and an on-going maintenance rate can be established in advance.
2) If you have pages on your website that will change often, such as product/item lists, special pricing/sales, or news articles, then updating the pages yourself will save you the cost of paying a developer every time something changes.
Our Web solutions include 2 hour training on how to update content without any programming knowledge.
Q: How do I get listed on the search engines?
A: Once you establish a site and domain name, your domain name is initially propagated through all the search engines to inform them of your presence. Search engines constantly change their algorithms and can drop your listing because of non-compliance or because your site remains unchanged for a length of time. When designing your website, we first make sure that the page content and the meta tags for each page are unique and relate to each other. This will result in higher listings from the search engines. In addition to that, we can further optimize your site by performing monthly resubmissions to the top 20 search engines to ensure that you are always compliant and registered within their databases, and are receiving the highest listings possible. Of course there are costs to optimize your site, and through proper planning, this service can be affordable to most organizations.
Q: How do I market my website?
A: We recommend that you include your website address on all of your corporate literature, business cards, stationery, brochures, fliers, handouts, invoices, purchase orders, yellow page ads, newspaper ads, job applications, promotional items, etc. The more visibility you create, the more chances people will visit your website.
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