Overview
Designing your website is the most time consuming aspect of establishing an online presence. You should start by visiting websites within your industry. You can find these sites by doing keyword searches in Google, Yahoo, Excite, and others. We suggest that you keep a list of keywords that lead you to sites that are most similar to yours, or which might list your competitors. (More on that later.)When you visit these sites, try to get a feel for the designs you like. Look at things like color combinations, large text versus small text, photos, stylish scrollbars, links across the top, or buttons down the left side. And of course, decide whether you like lots of flashing and blinking stuff, or not.
Building It
Once we have all that we need from you, we'll build it. This normally takes about three to four weeks. The price ultimately depends on: the number of pages you need; whether ‘artwork’ is provided, or created from scratch; whether most of the content already exists in company brochures; and, the degree of interaction between the site and the user (e.g., filling out forms, searching a database, etc.) Build Fees: A basic site of 8 to 10 pages, when a logo and brochures are provided, is typically between $1000 and $1500. Adding database capability (Active Server Pages) is an additional $750 for the first page and $400 per page thereafter.
Hosting
Once built, your site must be ‘hosted’. That is, it must be copied to a server that is connected to the internet. Galileo Storms uses one of the largest hosting services in the USA. Their 90,000 square foot building is located on 24 acres in North Carolina, and houses over 1000 servers, hosting over 180,000 websites. Hosting Fees: Fees to host a site are anywhere from about $25 per month to $150 per month depending upon size, traffic, and functionality. A basic website as described above including up to 15 email boxes is $35 per month. Additional mailboxes are $4 each per month.
Search Engines
Now that your site is hosted and available to everyone, it must be submitted to each of the search engines (e.g., Yahoo, Excite, Google, etc.) Since you kept a list of the best keywords (in the Overview above) we'll add them to your site (using something called meta-tags) and submit the site, to roughly 50 search engines and directories. And, since the web is constantly changing, we'll submit your site to new directories monthly. Submissions Fees: $12 per month.
Goals
Before actually designing your site, we need you to spend some time thinking about goals. Don't fall into the "everyone has a website, so I want one too" trap. Think about bringing in new customers, servicing existing customers better, and getting customers to buy more, more often.