WEBSITE DESIGN

If you need a domain name, we’ll help you get one. Your domain name is always registered in YOUR name. This sounds like it should be obvious – but it’s not. We have heard time and again about designers and web design firms registering their clients’ domain names to themselves. They were probably hoping that the client would never know the difference. It’s a way of holding their clients hostage. We think this practice is unethical.

When you register a domain name, there are four (4) contact types associated with the domain. They are the registrant, administrative, technical and billing contacts. When we register a domain name for a client, we will only list Bulldog Graphics as the technical contact. All other contacts will be in your name – especially the registrant. The registrant is the legal owner of the name. If you paid for the domain name, that should be you, right? We list Bulldog Graphics as the technical contact so that we will have access to the domain settings when we set up hosting, and so that we will also receive any expiration notices or account warnings. It’s always safer to have two people listed to receive these notices.

Additionally, we will give you full login access to your domain name. You have full control. You can change the contact information, change the nameservers, or change any account information. It’s your domain. We want our clients to call us because they want to… not because they have to. We don’t hold hostages.

After talking to you about your likes and dislikes, your intended audience, your site’s goals and objectives, and even your favorite colors, you’ll get three basic design ideas to choose from. From there, we pick the design you liked the best, and make changes and revisions to it.

These are three custom layouts, put together just for you and your company! After you pick your favorite, you are still free to adjust colors, change fonts, and move things around. It’s your web site. We want you to love it.

Hosting can be confusing. What server technology do you need? How much bandwidth? How many email accounts? We have partnered with several hosting companies and can find you the perfect fit. We’ll set up your hosting account for you (again, in YOUR name) and pre-pay the first year of hosting for you. You’ll be invoiced separately for your hosting, but you won’t have to do anything to get things set up. You will also have full login access to your hosting account.

Bulldog Graphics is not a hosting re-seller, so there will be no ‘markup’ on hosting fees. Our preferred hosting providers will typically charge $9.00 to $14.00 per month for hosting, depending on the hosting package you need. Often there are new account promotions that may lower your monthly hosting to as little as $1.99 per month for the first 1-3 years.

Included in your hosting package is a set number of email accounts. As part of your hosting setup, we’ll set up these email accounts for you, and give you all of the information you need to access your email via the web, and to connect to your email via Outlook or Outlook Express.

As part of your site training, and included in your Website Owners Manual, we’ll show you how to add new email accounts in the future, set up email forwarding if needed, and remove old email accounts.

Every site will include an email form handler on the contact page. Email links are o-kay… but they don’t work all the time. An email link may not work if your site visitor’s computer is set to launch the wrong program to send email. It’s not appropriate if your site visitor is looking at your site from a friend or neighbor’s house, or surfing at the library.

A contact page form handler works all the time. Anyone visiting the site can fill out the contact form and be sure that their inquiry will get to you – regardless of where they are, what computer they are using, or how that computer is configured.

Even if you don’t know what meta tags, keywords, descriptions, alt tags and title tags are, trust us when we tell you that they are important and you need them. They’re included with your site design and we’ll use every ethical means possible to boost your search engine rankings. (Learn more about the Search Engine Code of Ethics) We could have a long conversation about search engine placement – it’s a very lengthy topic. Contact us for more information about search engine rankings and placement.

Your new site will be submitted to Google, MSN/Bing, Yahoo, and Ask specifically. According to nearly every study reported (including ComScore), these four major networks, when AOL is included (serving Google’s results), provide 92% of all searches in the US. Many smaller search engines use these main search sites to supplement their results. So we concentrate on the big boys.

Favicon.ico files are little icons that are placed in your site’s root directory. When someone bookmarks your site, the favicon will appear in their list of favorites. With many browsers, it will also appear in the address bar. The robots.txt and sitemap.xml files are used by search engines to get a better understanding of your site structure and which files to include in their directories. These files are included with your site design.

We’ll setup your site with a Webmaster Tools  and Analytics account with Google. This gives Google more information about your site and gives us great information about your site’s ranking and what keywords are being used to find you. These are great tools for refining your search placement over time.

When your site is complete, we’ll go through everything with you. If part of your site development included a login area so that you could make your own updates, we’ll go over everything so that you understand how to log in, how to make the updates, and what areas of the site those updates will effect. The login areas that we build for our clients are web-based forms that are user-friendly, but we’ll make sure all of your questions are answered. We’ll also review your owner’s manual with you.

You’ll get files upon completion of your site that includes a copy your site files, your domain name registration information and account logins, your hosting information, your hosting agreement, email account information, email logins and passwords that have been set up for you, how to change your passwords, FTP access information and any other training, password or security information that you need to fully access your web site.

All of your site files will be included in your website owners manual package. You can request an updated/current copy or a zipped email at any time in the future at no charge. Again, we don’t hold hostages. This is your web site. You paid for it. The files are yours.

After your site is completed and you have a ‘go-live’ date, I’ll give you another month to look things over, get feedback and comments from friends, family and site visitors, and make any needed adjustments or changes. You won’t be billed for our regular hourly maintenance rate for changes in that first month.

Now don’t take advantage… this doesn’t mean that you can add 20 new pages or completely change the site’s design. This service is meant to have many new eyes look at the site and find things that maybe we didn’t see before.

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