Site Planning

When a small business decides to dip its toes into the sometimes turbulent waters of the Internet, it makes sense to take stock of what that business offers and how it needs to advertise.

Step 1. The Business Plan

If you don't have a business plan, make one.  This is the first step to any successful business.  It defines what makes your business different from your competitors.  While not our main focus, we can assist new businesses in writing up a business plan.  This is best done for local clients only as it requires some face-to-face discussion.

Step 2. The Domain Name

Okay, you have your business plan, now you need to decide what part the Internet plays in that plan.  This is where you choose a domain name (the address your customers will type into their browser.)  Not all names are available and not all suffixes (.com, .net, .org, .edu, etc) are right for all types of businesses.  Web By Design offers domain name registration.  We can also help you choose an appropriate name and suffix to make the most of your domain name.

Step 3. Hosting

Hosting refers to the physical location of your website.  Even though the Internet is "everywhere" your files will need to live somewhere, and your customers will find them using the address that is attached to the domain name you chose in step 2.  Web By Design can assist you in finding the right hosting for your files.  We are constantly searching the Internet for not only inexpensive hosting, but quality hosting.  Free hosting can sometimes mean it is laden with ads.  It is often better to pay a monthly (or yearly) fee to know that there will be no unintended ads on your site.  Some hosts offer free hosting, but charge for other services.  Let us help you make the right choice for your business.

Step 4. Template or Custom Design

Once you have a domain name and a place to store your web files, you need to GET some web files.  Web By Design offers full custom web sites (meaning that we design the site specifically for you, and no one else will have one like it at all.)  We also offer the use of templates (where part of the coding is done in advance either by our staff or a separate contractor or provider), we then customize that frame to suit your needs.  There may be other sites that are similar (because they were built with the same template), but by customizing the colors, fonts and graphics, your company can still have a unique presence on the Internet.  Most of this customization is done via CSS or Cascading Style Sheets. 

Web By Design has an affiliate relationship with a template creation company.  We have a partial catalog of their available templates here on our site.  If you choose to buy one of these templates (or have us buy it for you), we will receive a small incentive from the company, and you will know that you have chosen a template designed by authors we have worked with in the past, so there won't be surprises about how the template is supposed to work.  Some of the hosting companies we deal with offer free templates with the purchase of hosting packages.  We also have a partial listing of these free templates on our site.  These templates are less customizable than the ones that can be purchased above.

Step 5.  Content

You now are ready to provide us with content.  We will need graphics of your products, descriptions of your services, prices, etc.  We will need contact information so that customers can find you once they see your web page. 

What if you have a web site, but it needs to be updated?  The look is old, the information is old, you just don't like it anymore, or your previous web master has disappeared?  Web By Design can help in this situation too.  We can update an existing site (looks the same, but has new information), we can design a new look (but the information stays the same), or we can start over, keep the best of it, toss the rest of it.

At this point in the process, if you haven't signed a contract with Web By Design, you will be asked to.  We don't mind if clients want to get their own domain name, hosting and templates and provide them to use for use in the design process, but we will not do any design work without a contract in place.  You may wonder what is included in our packages. 

Step 6. Maintenance

Once your site is up and running, how are you going to keep it fresh and appealing to your customers?  The best way is by doing frequent updates and changes to the site.  Web By Design recommends at least seasonal/quarterly changes.  Offer a special, announce an event, show a new item/line.  Sites that don't change, get stale, and stale sites get forgotten. 

Web By Design offers Maintenance Contracts for its design customers.  In some circumstances, we will also accept Maintenance Contracts for sites developed by other developers, but there is usually an additional fee.