Keep Costs Down

 

 

The cost of advertising and promotions – including the cost of building and maintaining a web-site – is a cost borne to the small business owner.  Here are some tips for more efficiently managing your web-site:

 

 

 

Know What You Want

 

Very significant cost savings can be achieved by selecting one of our featured web-sites as a templates and having planned what text, pictures, and colors you want for your web-site.  Be assured, the website will be fully customized.  To the extent you provide us with initial details for your web-site, your cost will be lower because there should be much less time spent on after-production modifications and tweaks (time is money).   Ideally, at our initial meeting you will provide us with:

 

·            a sketch of the web-site identifying background and text colors

·            a list of which items you want to appear in the header or sidebar columns

·            outline of menu choices & color scheme (if a menu is needed to serve multiple pages)

·            typed pages corresponding to the menu choices (photos may be embedded too), as applicable

·            preferred fonts/typeface

·            photos either to-be-scanned or image files (jpg, gif, bmp)

 

Now, having stated the above, if your needs are rather straight forward and your text is not particularly lengthy then you need not be all that concerned with what is written above.  Many small businesses merely want a nice looking web-site with a few pictures, a few paragraphs of content, and the necessary particulars such as location, hours of operation, phone number etc.  To be clear, it is okay to provide us with the details you want included on your web-site and to simply advise us that you want your web-site to kinda sorta look like xyz.com.  In such a case, all we ask is that you acknowledge that you are giving us artistic license (to some degree); that any significant time we spend changing the styling later on will add additional cost to you.  We want to avoid cost overruns for you and make you happy.  We will always discuss cost prior to doing the work.

 

 

Make Content Updates Yourself

 

If you have a PC and are handy with a word processor (or html editor) you can keep maintenance costs way down by updating your web-site’s content yourself.  By “content” we mean the web pages that display based on menu selections, such as the text you are reading now.  We can also designate just a certain portion of a web-page as a separate updateable content section.  When you selected “cost containment” from the menu, this page was displayed.  To further clarify and to serve as an example, this particular page was created in MS Word and uploaded to this web-site with no further modifications made to it (it’s a different color on purpose).  It is nothing more than a word processing document.  MS Word (MS Works too) allows users the option to “Save As” a web page.  Provided you have an internet connection, updating a content page on your web-site can be as easy as:

 

1.         creating a MS Word or MS Works document with the information and styling of your choice

2.         saving it as: “Web Page, Filtered”

3.         uploading the new page to your web-site thereby over-writing the old page of the same name

 

The process of “uploading” a page to your web-site is easily learned.  Free easy-to-use FTP (uploading) software is available. The software shows a list of the files from your PC on the left, and a list of your web-site files on the right.  You simply click on a file in the left side to highlight it, then click the upload button to upload it up to the internet, where it will appear on the right hand side.  Done!

 

The process of making web page updates is even easier if you use a text editor designed for use with web-pages (called an “HTML Editor”).  We can provide you with a free HTML Editor whereby making web page updates is as simple as typing the changes, clicking “save,” and then clicking “Upload File to Server.”  Yes!  With our web-sites, it will be that easy.  You will not have to learn any technical coding.

 

The structures of our web-sites are particularly user friendly to web-site owners who have some limited experience working with web-pages.  The content web-pages are separate and apart from the more complicated web-pages that form the web-site’s overall structure and navigation system.  In other words, you will almost have to intentionally muck-up the inner workings of your web-site.  But be that as it may, a copy of all your web-site’s pages may be stored in a separate back-up directory on your web-site (you should also have disk copy).  Inadvertent mess-ups are easily and inexpensively corrected. 

 

This design feature makes it easy to update web-site content as often as desired.  For example, a restaurant owner may wish to include weekly specials on the web-site.  In that case, we would include a “weekly special” button on the web-site which displays a content page entitled “content-weekly.html.”  Then, each week, the owner would use MS Word, MS Works, or an html editor to update a copy of the web-page saving it as “content-weekly.html” then uploading it to the web-site replacing the previous version.   The weekly special web-page could just as easily be a scanned image of the restaurant’s weekly special menu, in which case, the web-page would be entitled “content-weekly.pdf.”

 

To be clear, although we would encourage you to maintain and update the content on your web-site yourself, we will be happy to manage that function for you.