Exactly what services do you provide? We take the information you provide along with your guidelines and create the web-page files that comprise your web-site. That's our main task. We can further assist you by taking care of these administrative tasks as a courtesy:
What kind of relationship will we have? We will be your assistant for the purpose of getting your web-site up and running. We will interact with web-hosting companies on your behalf for your convenience. Web hosting companies have the large disk drives that hold your web-site files and make them available via the internet.
Your web-site will reside under our account with hostmonster.com. We will make all web-site updates and changes for you while you are with us. We charge a nominal annual administrative fee to keep your web-site under our private account with hostmonster.
Alternatively, if you want to make web-site updates yourself, we will provide you with your own web-site password and give you instruction as necessary.
Please note that we have no affiliation with hostmonster.com. We include their name here only because we are familiar with them and satisfied with their services.
We do not guarantee anything concerning any web-hosting companies. We do not host web-sites on our computers. top
I do not like to write. Must I draft perfect text for my web-site? No. We will always attempt to clean-up any obvious typos or awkward wording. If you put effort into your text, it's likely we will not spend much time making minor corrections.
Issues related to text really only apply if you have content pages full of text with multiple paragraphs. If your site consists primarily of bullet points, photos, and video, then there should be no real concern regarding the drafting of text. top
I do not have a logo. Can you help me create one? Yes and No. If a logo is critical to your business plan, perhaps a better choice is to seek advice from a professional PR consultant, advertising professional, or graphics artist. However, we can incorporate just about any text or graphic as a theme in your web-site. In our moving graphic, for example, we can spin or wiggle text or small graphics - see the upper portion of this page. top
Do I have to use up all the menu choices? No. If all your content fits in one page, you won't need a menu at all. The menu is easily expanded or reduced to meet the needs (or size) of your web-site. top
I really only need 1 page. Will this bring my cost down? Difficult to answer that question. The incremental cost of one, several, or 10 pages of content in one of our template web-sites is largely dependent on how much time we must spend formatting each page. Actually, we really don't use "templates" in the sense that most people think of the word. It's possible that a 10 page web-site that is comprised of mostly well written text provided to us in MS Word or email may cost less than a single page web-site requiring lots of photo, video, and text editing on our part. However, all things being equal, the fewer the pages, the less the cost. top
Can you set me up with a blog or to collect email addresses for web marketing? Yes. Your website can be developed with a membership database which stores the email addresses of all those who register as a member. Yes. We can develop a customized blog / newsletter as part of your website. top
What about my email address? Most web-hosting companies supply email addresses corresponding to your domain. For example, if your web-site is xyz.com, you can choose an email name such as joe@xyz.com and we can arrange to have emails addressed as such forwarded to your regular email address. Or, you may elect to configure your email software (e.g., Outlook or Outlook Express) to interact with xyz.com directly to retrieve and send joe@xyz.com email as a second email account on your PC. You may even elect to drop your current email address altogether and use one or more email addresses at xyz.com. Hostmonster allows you as many email addresses as you want. Be sure to consider email before we get started. Establishing email addresses at start-up is part of our overall price - there is a charge if you change your mind later and want us to add additional email addresses. top
I (or someone I know) is good with PCs and Word Processing. Please tell me more about making web-site changes myself. The idea here is making it a snap for a small business owner to maintain their web-sites with periodic updates. Web-sites can be an inexpensive and effective communications vehicle for daily, weekly, or monthly specials, - or - for posting limited time coupons, and also for posting employee work schedules - and the list goes on..
We can design web-sites that utilize what we call "content pages." That is, the web-site shows certain content by drawing in separate web-pages that hold the content. The text you are reading right now is such a content page. It's independent from the black section above and the column to the left. Making a change to it does not require any changes anywhere else on the web-site. That is, the change is made to this page alone, which then replaces the earlier web-page of the same name on the web-site.
MS Word allows users to save documents as web-pages. Obviously, the function is there because it's really doable and practical to format your own content pages that way. An html editor is probably a better option but requires additional knowledge. The updated content pages are for display only. They do not include coding to frame how they will interact or appear with other pages on the web-site. Their simplicity is also their beauty. We think this can mean value and efficiency for many small business owners who want to keep costs down and spend less time working through us for periodic changes. However, this is an option for those who are more advanced PC users - who are somewhat knowledgeable about html and ftp.
Also, keep in mind that we will be happy to make changes to your web-site for you. top
What about .pdf files? Can I scan my diner's menu into my PC and upload that? Yes you can. We can make a menu option or link point to a .pdf file name. This might be a good option where the owner has already paid someone to format a nice looking document they want to appear on their web-site. top
Will my web-site have a cookie cutter feel by using a web-site template such as yours? Not really. There are an uncountable number of web-sites on the internet. Nobody is keeping score on which businesses use which templates. Although we use the word "template" to refer to the underlying structure of our featured web-sites, we don't utilize templates in the sense that most people think of when they hear the term "template." If your business plan requires a very unique web-site to establish or maintain a particular image, then perhaps you might want to consult a PR or advertising professional before contacting us. In any case, our "templates" are a variety of styles typically using a header (the top part of the web-site), a column on one side or on both sides, and a content section often driven by a menu. The size, color, and content of the header, columns and content sections are all customized to order.
Also, please know that we are happy to design unique web-sites that are not based on our templates or our sample web-sites. top
Technical: re: home made web-pages - validation? If you choose to make your own web-site updates then whether your pages validate is a matter of your coding. If you elect to utilize MS Word to produce updated web pages, the pages won't validate. But validation ought not be a relevant issue. Validation is not really important for web-pages that do nothing more than display text in paragraphs - as would be the case with MS Word or MS Works generated pages. However, if you use an html editing program to generate the pages, it ought not be difficult to get your pages to validate. If this subject is bewildering to you, our advice is "don't worry about it." top