A website is essential to any business these days. Without it, you may lose customer confidence, deny services to your customers, and even lose customers, not to mention the inability gain future customers. Our population is growing a strong attitude of immediate gratification. If you aren't accessible to them on the web, they will most likely be going to your competition who is.

The web is also a great place to help build a trusting relationship with your customers. You now have given them a sense of comfort with a 24/7 access point in which they can become more familiar with your services and product at their leisure. If you have a site that is well built, your customers may spend more time collectively on your site, than they ever would in your store, and even visit it more often. With the convenience of a website, your visitors become self-help shoppers, thus freeing up employee resources that cost money. For example, we helped a business build the online shopping center. They already had four other brick and mortar stores, but when their web site was finished, they found that their website generated more revenue online, than any of their other stores, which required 20-30 employees each. Their web site only needed employees to complete the orders, and they used their store employees to do so in their slow time. They just increase their own profit margin with a small investment in their website.

A web site is just like a dynamic business card. However, you can put all sorts of information on your site, that you couldn't on a card. You also have the potential of marketing to the world in a way you can't do through mail, television, or in person. You save time, money, and resources since your website has an initial cost and is always there.

Overall, if you're reading this, you have only helped to prove the point that having a website is not only important, it is necessary.

Well, that all depends! If you are just looking for an informational site that consists of a home page, contact page, and some additional information, the site won't take as long to build as a more involved site, such as one with a shopping cart. Other factors to consider when budgeting time for a website, is the availability of the content needed to complete the site, changes that might need to made to content or design throughout the build process, and if you will be needing to rely on others in providing approval or content delivery. Usually, the more information and the more people involved in the process, the longer it will take to complete your site. A basic site can usually be completed from concept to build within 5-10 business days. However, business web sites can take 4-6 weeks and even up to a year to complete, depending on the features and programming involved to build a spectacular site your customer will come to use and depend on. If you want your site completed as quickly as possible here are a few tips to help you out:

• Have all the information ready that you will be using on your web site, in your brochures, and any other media.

• Make sure all content is checked for spelling and grammar errors.

• Stay in touch with your web site developer often. Open communication helps to reduce any misunderstanding. Make sure your developer explains his time line thoroughly and you are satisfied with the progress.

• Be careful of scope creep. When you add information or enhancements to the project, you push out the deadline. If the deadline is important, perhaps consider adding the feature or change after the project has been completed.

• Provide examples of what you are looking for to take out some of the guess work when building your design.

There is a saying in the IT world:
You can have it cheap, fast, or good, but not all three.
If you want it cheap and fast, it will not be good.
If you want is fast and good, it will not be cheap.
If you want it good and cheap, it will not be fast.

A good web site has a high boomerang quality. That means your customers value your website and use it as a resource for acquiring the information or product they need or want. We use a boomerang scale of 0-10, with 10 being the highest possible score. If you already have an existing web site, you might have an idea of what your boomerang rating may be. If not, we can evaluate your site for you and offer solutions to help increase your rating. When you build your site, there are several things to consider in delivering your information:

• The layout is clean, organized, relative, aesthetic, and easy to use. It should not be cluttered, unclear, offensive, screaming, or seizure inducing (no blinking) - they may never come back at all! If your site is about fantasy football, but it has Hello Kitty on it, you may confuse your visitors, and they will most likely deem the entire site as a irrelevant.

• Information is grouped together effectively and links are not broken.

• Your site provide daily, weekly, or monthly specials and online-only coupons to use.

• Your site offers a club they can join to special members only coupons, discounts, and/or perks.

• Your site has content that changes often and is accurate and useful. You can use RSS feeds to help your customers know when there is new information or product available to remind them to come visit your site.

• Your site had online newsletters and an archive of past ones. Sending emails to your customers helps to remind them you are out there and gives them a good excuse to check out your site.

• Your site can provide support and customer service and contact information to reach you.

• You provide a service online that your competition doesn't or can't. It is helpful to do a search online and find out who your competition is, and find out what you can do to make your site even better. We provide a service that can do that for you. We can consult with you what you might need on your site and how it will help, and you can choose what you want to do.

Just about anything you can dream of! Always be careful if you find a developer telling you that adding a certain feature is impossible. These days, the web is limitless, and there isn't much you really can't do if anything at all! You can add just about anything interactive from videos, to live voice chats, photo galleries and even instant messaging. If you find a need for it on your site, we can find a way to make it happen!

But you must be considerate of your clients and their browsers capabilities. Not all browsers are treated equal and what will work for one, may not work for another. Also, there are certain media that you can put on your site that users can block using their browser settings, which could deny them access to important information you might be trying to deliver. Just make sure that whatever information you provide in an interactive format, can also be accessed from in a basic text format. Any good developer should be able to help you with this.

You should always use professionals when the reputation of your business is on the line. Along with education, experience is quite invaluable. A professional can provide services, work faster and more reliably, than perhaps a high-school student doing web sites for a hobby. A professional who loves developing web sites, will give you the time you need to build an online portal with high quality and the desired results. You also want a site that looks professional. In our own browsing of the web, we have found that over 85% of website we review are terrible and lack the necessary quality to build confidence in their visitors. You work hard for your business, you should have a website that reflects that and will help to return your investment. Beware of services that look like they are promising to good to be deals. They usually are. They get you to sign a contract for a site that they may tell you will cost only a couple hundred dollars, but then you only get a home page and everything else is ballooned in price, and you still end up paying thousands, and you still get an inferior site.

Many developers are just hackers. That means they can produce a site, but they generally use someone else's code and just modify it as needed. This can cause problems when it comes time to troubleshoot errors that may be happening on your site, because they may spend more time trying to fix it, they may not understand why it is broken in the first place, or they may break something else in the process. We are often called in to clean up a site, and it amazes us constantly as what some developers do try to get away with, that could have been avoided all along.

You should also check the website references. What do the previous clients have to say and are they happy? Does their website effectively reflect their reputation? Would you want a website that looks like that? Your website reflects you and your company, you should be proud of it and confident in it, not wondering if it could be better or if it is working for you. To learn more about what makes a good site and breaks a bad site, read our article You get what you pay for

The bottom line is, you get what you pay for.

We can help with that! We can help you get noticed online using various online and print methods. We can help set you up with Google® AdWords, Microsoft® Ad Center, Facebook® Ads, and more. We can even put an ad for you on our site. We can also help you promote your business with promotional materials such as posters, brochures, print ads for magazines and newspapers, giveaways (ie. pens, note pads, gadgets, and more).

We provide professional design and consulting services at a great value to help lift you ahead of your competition and get your the recognition you are looking for. If you are interested in learning more, contact us today!