FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS
WEBSITE DESIGN & DEVELOPMENT
1. Why should a business have a website?
2. What do I need in order to put a site on the web?
3. How much should I budget for a professional website?
4. How do I promote my website?
5. Why is my site not listed in Google, Yahoo and other Search Engines?
6. How do I know if I'm getting visitors to my website?
7. Why is it important to track my online traffic?
WEB STANDARDS
8. What are Web Standards?
9. What is CSS web design?
10. Why use CSS?
DOMAIN NAMES & WEB HOSTING
11. What is a domain name?
12. How do I register a domain name?
13. What is web hosting?
14. Can I host my own site?
1. Why should a business have a website?
A professional website is a great compliment and opportunity for any business. With a website your business is accessible to anyone, anytime, anywhere in the world with an Internet connection. A website allows your business to compete on a local level, a national level and an international level, getting you that added exposure that you would not have without a website. A website works you for even when your not there. People can go to your website and learn about your business, your products or services, how to get in touch with you and even purchase your products or services.
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2. What do I need in order to put a site on the web?
In order to have a website on the internet, you will need a domain name, web pages that form a website and finally, web hosting. For the convenience of our customers, we offer each of these services to get you online as quickly and easily as possible. In fact, included with every new project is a domain name, three months of web hosting service, and basic web statistics absolutely FREE!
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3. How much should I budget for a professional website?
It's wise to watch the bottom line with any investment in your business, and a professional website IS an investment in your business. Prices will vary and only you know what your budget is. We suggest you consider the following; How much does it normally cost to acquire a new customer? What is the lifetime value of a customer to my business? What am I presently spending on advertising? What do my customers expect from my business and me? And remember, a website is a business expense and qualifies as a write-off.
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4. How do I promote my website?
Print media is still an excellent way to promote traffic to your website. Another successful method is search engine marketing, as users are searching for and researching specific products and services to help them make informed buying decisions. Let us analyze your business, website, goals, and competition to develop an advertising strategy to help your target audience find your business online.
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5. Why is my site not listed in Google, Yahoo and other Search Engines?
When building a website there are several things which must be done in order to fully optimize your site for the web: this is referred to as Search Engine Optimization. Search engines care very little about how much your site costs, or how pretty it is. What they do care about is relevant content and excellence in programming. The sites that gain prominence on the search engines are those that are relevant to their markets, rich in content and promote usability for the end user. And remember, it can take search engines anywhere from several weeks to several months to add web sites to their listings.
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6. How do I know if I'm getting visitors to my website?
It's smart to keep track of your web traffic: unlike rush hour, this traffic is desirable. There is software that can measure how many visitors come to your site, where they come from, how long they stay, where they travel to within your site, etc. We implement a basic version of this feature to our customers FREE with every new web project, and also offer advanced web statistic packages.
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7. Why is it important to track my online traffic?
If you know when & where prospects come from and what they want, you'll convert more of them into customers. This data also aids you in determining Return On Investment: for example, if you advertise on Yahoo and Google, you can determine where the most traffic came from, which in turn will help you quantify your investment & make future advertising decisions. If you notice weekly or monthly peaks and valleys in your website traffic, you may want to take advantage of this to offer promotions/incentives and or vital information during peak usage and maximize the added exposure.
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8. What are Web Standards?
Web standards are a set of technological methods, created and established by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C). These technological methods promote the development of the Web and are designed to offer its benefits to as many users as possible. Websites built according to these standards not only provide web users with high quality services, they allow browsers to easily read the website's code so that they have a higher likelihood of being ranked in the top listings of search engines. Our company has embraced the latest in Web Standards, and utilizes technologies such as CSS to make sure all of our websites comply with industry standards.
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9. What is CSS web design?
Efficient, Flexible Web Page Design CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) offer a way of keeping content and design elements separate. Because this separation allows us to include more meaningful content on each page, web sites designed with CSS utilizing web standards often provide their owners with more benefits than older table-based websites.
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10. Why use CSS?
There are three main advantages for any business that embraces CSS; Ease of maintenance, greater search engine visibility, and increased user accessibility. A website designed with CSS allows design elements for an entire website to be changed in a single file. The larger the website, the greater the benefits of switching to CSS will become. Also, by reducing unnecessary tags which are not required by CSS, the actual web page content may become more readily apparent to search engines. And finally, although switching to CSS does not necessarily result in more accessible pages, at the very least it allows a skilled designer to remove unnecessary clutter and leave clues for those who use mobile devices or assistive technology to view your pages.
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11. What is a domain name?
A domain name is a unique address which points to a website (www.websurfmedia.com). Almost all domain names begin with www (standing for World Wide Web), and are used to make sites easier to remember. Many different suffixes can be assigned to domain names, such as .com, .org, and .net.
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12. How do I register a domain name?
First you will have to make sure that the domain you want is available using something called a "WHOIS" lookup. If available, you can register the name yourself for a fee, or have a Website Provider do it for you. We offer our customers a FREE domain name with every new web project.
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13. What is web hosting?
The World Wide Web is a massive collection of websites, all hosted on computers (called web servers) all over the world. The web server (computer) where your website's html files, graphics, etc. reside is known as the web host. Web hosting clients simply upload their websites to a shared (or dedicated) web server, which the internet service provider maintains to ensure a constant, fast connection to the internet. We offer our customers three months of web hosting service FREE with every new web project.
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14. Can I host my own site?
You could, but it takes a lot of work to do it properly on your own. First of all, most internet service providers will not let you use your internet connection for web hosting, and doing so will result in termination of your account. Second of all, it can be a royal pain to keep things running smoothly; securing your network so no one can hack into it, setting up the actual server operating system, setting up & maintaining an email server, etc.
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