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| What can a web site do for my company? | ||
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These are just some of the things that a web site can do for your company: 1. Sell products online. 2. Advertise products to increase sales through current channels. |
3. Provide product support to customers. 4. Communicate with current and new customers. 5. Enhance information transfer throughout your company. | |
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| How much is a web site going to cost? | ||
| We design web sites. We will recommend a good web site host if you like, but we don't make any money from hosting your web site. Be careful of companies that design a web site at a very low cost. They may require you to host the web site on their server at a high cost. | Once you pay us for your web site, you own it, and you can do whatever you want with it. Compare prices for your complete package when shopping around for web site design services, including web site design, hosting, domain name registration, and web site registration with search engines. | |
| Approximate basic web site costs | | |
| Web site design | $100/page | |
| Search engine registration | Free if we design your page | |
| Domain name registration | $5-35/year | |
| Basic web site hosting | $6-20/month | |
| Secure server capability | $10/month | |
| Online shopping web site package cost | ||
| Extended business card web site package cost | ||
| Simple advertisement or personal web site package cost | ||
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| How do I run a web site once it's installed? | ||
| Operating a basic "expanded business card web site" doesn't require you to do anything. If you wish, you can monitor the web site usage, or answer customer's Email, but that isn't necessary. This simple type of web site will advertise your company and products and increase sales through your current channels on its own. | An online shopping web site will require at least daily monitoring to check the database for orders, and to answer Email questions sent in by the customers. You will need to work with credit cards, fill the orders, and ship those orders to the customers. If your prices or stock change often you will need to update the web site to reflect those changes. | |
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| How can I measure the effectiveness of my web site? | ||
| People often talk about web site hits, but this can be very misleading. Every time a visitor looks at a new page in a web site, a program logs 1 hit for the page, and 1 hit for every image on that page. This can add up to many hits if the page has many images, or 1 hit if it contains only text. A more accurate measure would be to count the number of visitors that read the page. We provide software that generates a report of hits and visitors to your web site. | An even more valuable measure is the value of the online sales, or the increase in offline sales generated by the web site. The increase in offline sales is sometimes checked by offering coupons on the web site and noting how many of them are returned to the store, or by asking customers making purchases what brought them to the store. | |
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| How long will it take to create and install a new web site? | ||
| We can create and install a basic web site in less than a week after we both agree on the content of the web site, and you supply your materials. | Larger, more complicated web sites requiring extra features and more programming will require more time. | |
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| Can I create and setup my own web site? | ||
| Yes, you can do it all yourself, but it is probably more economical to hire us to design and set up your web site than for you to spend all the time necessary to figure out all the details for yourself, purchase the necessary tools, and learn how to use them well. | We will design your web site for about $100/page. CGI scripting and some graphics work will cost extra. Exact costs will be determined when we define just what the web site project requires. | |
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| What kind of web site do I need? | ||
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A full
shopping web site
can advertise your product, take orders, and provide
customer support after the sale, but it will require that someone monitors
the web site to service the orders, and you will have to accept credit card
payments, and ship the products. If you aren't comfortable taking orders from your web site, an online catalog web site will advertise your product, and provide information to customers, but it won't take orders. It will direct customers to order through the USmail, phone, or however you prefer to take orders. You won't have to monitor the web site for orders, or take credit card information over the Internet, but you will need to open your mail and answer the phone to take orders, accept credit cards or checks for payment, and you will still need to ship products. |
If you already have a business, an
extended business card web site
will enhance
your current advertisements and increase business through your current sales
channels with a minimum of cost and extra effort. Advertisement space is so
expensive that businesses can't include all the information that they want, nor
run the advertisements as long as they want at a reasonable cost.
An extended business card
web site allows you to include all information that you think might help your
business in a web site. Then you include your domain name in all your current
advertisements, in your correspondence, and everywhere else that you typically
include your business name, address, and phone number. A good domain name is
easy to remember, especially after a prospective customer sees it a few times,
and now all interested prospective customers with access to the Internet can
look at your web site and be convinced to visit your business. We can also design and setup a personal web site about your favorite hobby, political views, geneology, or anything else you want to tell the world. | |
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| Do I need my own computer, web server, or Internet access? | ||
| You don't need your own computer to have an online catalog or extended business card web site. Your own computer would provide a convenient way to review your web site and to check on visitor usage, but many public libraries provide free Internet access from their computers. You should have your own computer and a normal connection (not a T1 or T3) to the Internet if you have a full shopping web site because you will be monitoring the site for orders quite often. | Very few web site owners have their own server. Almost everyone rents space at a web site hosting company (for about $6-20/month) that has the necessary web servers, web server support, and fast high bandwidth Internet connections. Web server support requires a lot of specialized knowledge that most small companies can't provide economically. A web site requires a fast high bandwidth Internet connection like a T1 or T3 line to allow visitors, or even multiple visitors to quickly view its contents, and these lines are very expensive. | |
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| Do I need my own domain name? | ||
| A domain name looks like this: www.myCompany.com. It does not look like: www.something.myCompany.com or www.something.com/myCompany. Most web sites need their own domain name. It looks more professional, and is easier for customers to remember than a sub-domain or directory of an ISP's domain. | Some search engines won't list your site if you don't have your own domain name. You will probably invest a lot of effort getting users to use your web site, and will want to take it with you if you change web site hosts. It only costs $5-35/year to register your own domain name, and your web site host will probably charge an extra $5/month for domain name service. | |
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| Will someone host my web site for free? | ||
| There are many places that will host your web site for free. Internet accounts often come with free web site space, but free web site hosts may not provide services that your web site will need, or allow you to use your own domain name. | You should use a web site host that you trust, and one that provides the services that your web site needs. Paid web site hosting costs about $6-20/month. | |
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| Is it safe to accept credit card payments over the Internet? | ||
| Credit card companies actually consider the use of credit cards on the Internet to be safer than traditional use off the Internet. When a customer submits their credit card number to a secure server, it is encrypted for the transmission to the server, and should remain encrypted until it is used to bill the credit card company, and then it should be destroyed, severely limiting the number of people that are able to abuse it. | A customer's liability is usually limited to $50 if someone should obtain their credit card number and start using it without authorization. Making purchases using a credit card gives the customer some extra protection because they can contest a bill if they feel they have been cheated in an online transaction. | |
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| How do I get people to look at my web site? | ||
| Make your site interesting and be sure it loads quickly or prospective customers will quickly leave. Offer something of value like information, coupons, good deals, or easier shopping. | Register your web site with search engines so customers will find your site when they search for it, and include your domain name in advertisements, and on all of your promotional material. | |
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| Who is the audience for my web site? | ||
| A web site can be designed to be available to the widest audience by limiting features to basic text, but it won't be very interesting. Adding simple graphics won't eliminate many visitors, and will make it much more attractive. Even visitors that turn off their graphics to make surfing faster probably won't be put off, because almost all web sites have graphics. Adding many large graphics and animations can increase the download time causing some visitors with slow interconnect connections to leave before it finishes loading. | Large browser windows can contain lots of information, and are great for those users who have a large monitor and a state of the art graphics card, but the large browser windows can be unpleasant when users are forced to scroll up and down and back and forth just to see the page. Adding plug-ins like Flash® can make the web site very impressive, but visitors that haven't installed the plug-ins and those with old machines won't be able to view your web site. A successful web site design requires matching the web site features to the capabilities of the desired audience. A web site that is too fancy will lose just as many visitors as a web site that is not fancy enough. | |