On my personal sites, I have a bit of fun and do a lot of experimenting, so I don't market them at all because of all the changes and things I do. Like a plumber with leaky pipes or a nail technician with un-manicured nails, I spend my time working on my clients needs. However, I am a business to business service provider, which is much different than someone providing business to consumer products and services. We are all unique and it is that quality that separates us from everything else in the world and in many ways why your customers do business with you. Just like you can clearly feel and are currently experiencing my personality here visiting with me, your visitors should get a touch of your personality and character when visiting your site. When someone else represents you, they speak monotone, generic and do not really know your business, how your sell or represent your products or services and they don't know what your business focuses are. So, no matter who, where and why in developing your website and it's design, you should play a significant role and contribute to the content and design to add your personality, character and business focus. An example using me, is that my business focus is website design and maintenance and everything else is a value added service to my clients or insignificant to my business needs.

Websites Designers and What You Can Expect

First you have to understand the difference between a website designer and a graphics artist. They are two separate fields and I am far from a graphic artist. My expertise is as a webmaster or webmistress. All of my sites use basic graphic skills and not the use of a graphic artist. However, if a graphic artist is needed for any reason such as creating a logo, I do have resources to get the graphic art work done. Most small business owners have a particular and specific products or services they are providing and this is what I focus on for graphic content. An example might be an HVAC contractor, where as the company vehicles and employees are specific to that business and that business only. My point being, most small business owners will generally have plenty of graphic material that can be manipulated, formatted and used in website designing without a graphic artist.

In the beginning I focus on structure and navigation based on an account of all the services and products you provide and assign a sense of priority to them. With that in mind I create what I call a shell, an empty website that simply has navigation to and from all of the products and services desired by you. Then I go into a zone, a state of mind so to speak that puts me as close to representing you, your products and services as I can get and begin writing. This is a Do Not Disturb time for me. When I am in the zone, I consider everything you shared with me about you, your business and services and promote them as if speaking to one of your potential clients. This is not easy, but I seem to have a knack for it as well as a touch of creative writing. Writing content is one of the hardest parts and is very time consuming. You have to be sure to say what needs to be said in the amount of room available for the design format. As I develop content, I try to look forward and backward to insure it makes sense and the design is coming along well and is headed in the right direction. During this process, I will consider visual illustrations such as eye candy or functional images that serve a purpose. Once the basics are achieved such as the typical "About Us", "Services" "Contact Us" and a Landing or Index page, I begin the approval process by requesting that you review each page within the site and approve them for publication as well as share any suggestion for improvement or concerns that need redoing before publishing. While I might put an average of 16 hours a day into the websites development process, I work the approval process at a convenient pace for my clients.

From this point forward, I negotiate how big of a website you want and how we will maintain what we have so far. Many small business owners can find satisfactory internet presence with under ten pages, the biggest determining factor is generally the number of products and services provided. There is a lot to consider here, so I generally review this with you and the available options to accommodate focus, or ecommerce, in the beginning during development stages, so I know what lies ahead. Around this time, I take a break from what I have already published for you. The main reason is my eyes, generally by this time I will have spent several long days focusing my eyes on very small text and scripting on a led screen (lighted background) which is not good for the eyes and second, the process of page submission starts for those pages within the site that have been approved for publishing. This is a slow process, regardless of what anyone or any email ever tells you, search engines do what they want, when they want. It can take anywhere from a day to several weeks or months for some pages to make their way into all the search engine indexes. You can not pay a fee to speed this up, you can only do your best to follow the recommendations of each search engine. Over these weeks and months, together, we continue to finish the other desired pages and make modifications and adjustments to the originals for improvement of search engine optimization or simply a change you desired. Now you are on a positive path to effective, creative and affordable internet presence.

Websites Design Fees and Costs

The costs and fees associated to website development and design are very different for each person I provide services, but I will try to give you an idea so you can feel confident in contacting me to learn more. Just like any business, website designing is based on overhead, man-hours and a percent of profit. I've seen advertising from free to $2000 for a basic 5 page web design. How can this be?

Free or cheap websites are generally a product of a automated script and template, for instance, GoDaddy's Website Tonight Website Builder, they give you free hosting when you use this service and it is really a scam. Website builders are generally free with hosting service. If you look at GoDaddy's monthly rate for hosting and compare it to the monthly rate for Website Tonight Website Builder, you will see a monthly price increase for something that is totally free from others, why is this? It costs money to handle customer support and website builders mean more calls because the only people using them are people who really don't have a good understanding of what they are doing. It is simply a marketing ploy to target these people and milk them for as long as they can. Another example is Microsoft Windows Live used to give small business owners a free website using automated scripting and templates, after a few years of dealing with complaints and discouraged customers, they discontinued it and changed the platform to Microsoft Office 365, a fee based service. They have bigger fish to fry, so this was hurting their reputation and it forced them to move in a new direction where as GoDaddy has nowhere to go. The point here is that over the last few years, the message is finally getting out there that Free or automated scripted website templates are not effective and hurt small business owners in the process.

I have built a lot of websites over the years, in the beginning I was very proud and put site design links on every website I did and over time learned that some site owners were neglecting their websites which wasn't a good thing for me. So I learned two things, one I have to be very selective about what I do and who I do it for as well as promote website maintenance for my clients. So today, I try not to just do a website design, I try to negotiate it as part of a package to insure two things. First. my clients get an opportunity to experience what website maintenance means and second, we work together for a minimum of one year to see if we are an effective team.

If you simply want to see what I can do for you or you are someone interested in creating a personal page. The most common fee for this service and what I charge is $100.00 for each desired page. Each page would be considered the size of a standard 8.5" X 11" letter size document. So, if a page within the websites linking navigation has content that would accommodate two letter size documents, the fee would be $200.00 for that page, even though it is considered one page within the site itself. Do I nickel and dime this stuff, no, everything I do favors my clients. Using this service can allow you to experience working with me and the creative website designing I can do for you without any type of commitment. We can also modify this at anytime to accommodate just about any website design needs or concerns you may have. So, for just a few hundred dollars you could have a professionally formatted and designed website, this does not include any additional services such as website hosting or domain names or registration.

Website designing with maintenance is the preferred method of service by me and most all of my clients. This is like having a knowledgeable webmaster on retainer to help with any type of issue or concerns that arise that are associated to your website or internet presence. Clients that are on this service send me emails about domain renewals, advertising opportunities and other inquiries not related to website designs or maintenance and I always give them my best advice on what the inquiry actually means. Often, they are scams just to get your hard earned money, I do what I can to help you keep it. Anyhow, with my website maintenance agreement there is less pressure on you to get things done and you can get a pretty good feel of how effective my website design is and the websites ability to perform across all platforms. My work always starts out as investing in my clients and with my website maintenance agreement I invest in a long term relationship with you. If you commit a full year of working together, I don't charge a design fee.

Thanks for visiting my website and be sure to visit my contact page to learn more about me.
I wish you well in life and business.