Website Development

The first thing that you will need is someone to host your website. This is not the same as an ISP (Internet Service Provider), such as AOL, which provides dial-up access and some other features. The hosting service gives you actual space to store your site as well as free email and other nifty features, which you will need in addition to your ISP.

Unless you have an ISP with good web-hosting capabilities, including supporting Microsoft FrontPage Extensions, we suggest a company that we use with several of our clients, a company based in Silicon Valley called Web Hosting Logic, which offers web-hosting service at $6.95/month with no setup fee.

You need to register a domain name if you do not have one. The is like "www.xxxxxxxxxxxx.com" or the similar. In your case, it should be www.yourdomainname.com. Once your name is registered, no one else can have it and you own it. The cost to register a domain name is $5.00-25.00/year, depending on where the domain name is registered. This is the first step that you will need to take...get your domain name registered.

Most website development efforts require a minimum of 5-10 hours to create what we consider a basic website. We normally charge $110/hr billed by the minute. All work for non-profit organizations is billed at $100/h billed by the minute. We do not charge for telephone, e-mail or billing time as that is incorporated into our rates. There is no minimum monthly charge and we do not round up our time. However, we do charge a retainer, whic will be adjusted toward the monthly invoice. The amount of the retainerer is a percentage toward the extimated amount of the job, at $350.00 minimum.

If you are not interested in contract work, I am also available as a website consultant on an hourly basis. This rate is $150.00/hour and allows for you to have one hour of website work, including telephone, e-mail and billing time. You have 30 days from the start of billing to use up your hour. Any additional time over one hour, will be billed at the same rate with the same conditions. This is mainly for clients who need to use me on a one-time basis as it is not the recimmended route to proceed.

If you already have an existing website but find that your are not receiving the number of visitors expected and cannot be found on the major search engines, we can put what are called "META tags" on your website and submit it to the major search engines.

If you are interested in selling products and services on your website, we can also implement a shopping cart which will allow the customer to track sales, manage inventory, take credit cards, calculate shipping based on customer preferences and even send broadcast e-mails. You can check out the shopping carts at 1ShoppingCart and ShopSite.

If you want a custom-designed site, we will arrange for our designer to ascertain your target market and your particular needs. We also offer websites in Spanish.

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Having a presence on the World Wide Web does not have to be expensive. We will design and develop your website based on your ideas and specifications.

The way we do this is to set up a free initial consultation in order to determine your needs and requirements. Then we will give you an estimate in a couple of days.

You can start with a couple of pages in the beginning and then add more later, or you can do it all together ... the choice is yours.

• Why do you want a website?
• Is this an information site? Retail site? Portal?
• Who is your target audience?
• What do you want to accomplish?
• What do you want your audience to do once they arrive?
• How long is your design timetable?
• Who is responsible for gathering what?
• What do you or your clients do?