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Tips To Get Started

I wanted to give you some tips on assembling the data for your web site and some general information about web pages.  Please feel free to print this page for some valuable tips for your web site.  You may also CLICK HERE to download this information in msWord format.

You should think of your web site as an interactive BROCHURE on your company or organization. You visitors should be able to gain a good idea of what you are offering, how to contact you (phone, US mail address, FAX & e-mail). Your site will be comprised of text, your digital pictures and some graphics to dress the site up and make it more exciting. Graphics and pictures should be used sparingly though as they require a lot of storage space and take additional time to load when your visitor accesses your site. Your digital pictures should be taken at the LOWEST possible quality or density setting as they will take up minimal space, load much faster and the quality when viewed is almost as good as the high quality settings. It is often very difficult to distinguish the low setting from the high setting when viewing but the high setting often takes up to 5 times longer to load. Often visitors won't wait this additional time and leave before high setting pictures fully load. If you don't have access to a digital camera, you can take pictures or negatives to many discount stores or photo shops and they will transfer your pictures to .jpg format and put them on a floppy disk for you. The fees for this are quite reasonable and can be done in about 10 minutes.

To get started you should plan the basic pages you want on your site. Typically they would include: Home Page (the first page accessed when your site is visited) which would consist of your title, some text narrative describing what you do and a picture or two. The next page would normally be the About Us page where you describe your credentials, in a paragraphed resume form, as to why you are qualified to offer this service etc. Sites selling products or obvious services can often eliminate this page as it is adequately covered on the Home Page. The next page is normally the Contact Us Page where you list all contact information including US mailing address, phone, FAX and or course email link. The email link will appear on every page and when the visitor clicks on the hypertext a traditional email screen will pop up with your email address already filled in and ready for their text.

When sending information to us please write your text in msWord or in .txt format so we can inculcate these words in to your site. You have your choice of colors for text, background etc. and we can take text and graphics off other web sites also.  Pictures should be in .jpg format and should be in the lowest quality you can produce. All pictures should be labeled as to what they are and where you would like them placed, if you have a preference. We will take this information via email and put them on your site as we see fit. Once the site is uploaded you can view it as your visitors would and make additions or changes as you you see fit. We will then make these changes for you and thus keep refining your site until it is the way you want it. When selling products, I would recommend no more than 10 products, initially. What has worked well in the past is to list the products in two columns with a picture of the product and below it a brief description and the price. These are just some suggestions, we will gladly work with your ideas as best we can.

To accept MasterCard & Visa, Discover, American Express etc. payments through your site we would recommend PayPal at least to start. PayPal is a secure, fast and Free service to your customers and cost you about 3% of the total amount paid by the customer. There are no monthly fees or transaction fees and there is no set up fee. Once your PayPal account is opened, we would take your account information and place a link on your Payments Page that would go directly to PayPal. If your customer was not a PayPal client they could sign right then. To sign up with PayPal, access our web site and go to the Payments Page and click on the PayPal logo. They will instruct you as to how to sign up for free. You should have your Visa or MasterCard handy as well as your checking account information as you will need them to open an account. When your account is set up we would need some of this information to create the PayPal link on your site. PayPal is a great way to send & receive money throughout the US and has expanded to many foreign countries also.

Other e-Commerce systems with the shopping cart can also be utilized instead of PayPal but you would need a merchant account to accept Visa & MasterCard. These services typically have a set up fee which could be a couple hundred dollars, a monthly service fee of about $25, a transaction fee of about $.35 per sale and a percentage of the total sale amount ranging from 2% to 6%.

We will register you web site with several of the largest search engines. We will also do what we can to get you as close to the top of the search list as we can. Search engines have been overrated as a means of promoting your site however. Normally when people search a given topic in say Lycos they will be presented with search results of about 20 per page. Normally people will view the first 2 to 5 pages and make their selections. Rarely will they go beyond 5 pages to search for anything. The businesses listed beyond the 5 pages will see little or no traffic as a result of the search engines. Just for fun, go to a search engine and put in "gift stores" and see what you come up with. You will probably initially be viewing sites 1 - 20 of 368,243 (or some such number) total sites. So again, if you are not in the top part of your search category the search engines will do you little good. The best traffic to your site will be that which you generate by advertising your site address; www.yoursite.com. You will want to put this address and your email address on your stationary, business cards and invoices etc. Just remember that being registered with the search engines is good and we can see what we can do to get your site as high as possible on the list but if they were the be all and end all, you would not see companies advertising their web addresses on TV or radio etc. Often there are manipulations that can be done on a monthly basis to keep your site "bubbling up" as high as possible. We can also service your page on a monthly basis to insure you the best possible rankings.

Where should you hang your page.... or more aptly, who should host your URL or web site? There are web site host that are free, with NO monthly fee to pay. These are normally hosts who limit you to 20 Megabytes of storage and have somewhat limited band width but are quite satisfactory for small sites with a limited amount of visitors. They often will put banner ads on your site advertising their products or services. This is not inherently bad though as practically all web sites have some type of ads on them for other sites. There are other site hosts charging $5.00 a month which provide you with less ads, more storage and more band width. These hosting fees go all the way up to about $25 a month. Each increase in price provides you less compulsory ads, more storage space (larger site with more graphics etc) and larger band width which allows more data to be simultaneous sent; ideal for large sites with many many visitors. We will provide you with a list of several web site hosts in various price ranges etc. once we commence work on your site. The pay sites are normally required to support sophisticated graphics, video, music, autoresponders and some cgi scripting & other more sophisticated options. The more sophisticated the site, the more storage and band width required i.e. the monthly hosting fee goes up. A typical small business can easily use one of the Free hosts adequately.

On an on-going basis we will be available to make changes to your site and re-position your site with the search engines on a monthly basis if desired. Many search engines provide better placement to sites that are re-submitted regularly or tweaked to stimulate better search engine placement. This ongoing service is an option and not a part of our regular web site development service.

Every web site has two portals of entry, the front door where your visitors go and the back door where the site owner can work on the site and monitor information about the site. You will be able to see how many visitors have visited your site day by day, what pages they accessed, where they came from (what search engine or by directly typing in your address) many charts and graphs also. You will be able to easily find out all the vital statistics for your site.

If you already have a domain name (www.yourdomainname.com) fine, we can work with that. If you don't have a domain name we will check for the name(s) you prefer and reserve them for you. A domain name may be held for two years at a time for a fee of about $70 for the whole two years. To use many of the Free site hosts you can omit this domain name reservation. With our Free to moderately priced web site hosts your domain name is free also.

Normally your web site can be up and functional in about a week. If questions arise, please contact us at your convenience.

If questions arise please contact us at your convenience. We look forward to working with you in the near future.