Responses to frequently asked questions may help, but if you have a question that isn't mentioned here, please contact us. Thank you.
Q. How can I contact you?
A. You can click the Contact Us button or call toll free 9 am to 5 pm CST, M-F.
Q. Where can I find your pricing?
A. Our services are usually customized to meet individual specifications. You can order our pre-priced services or request an estimate.
Q. How do I request an estimate?
A. You can click the Contact Us button or call toll free 9 am to 5 pm CST, M-F.
Q. How do I engage your services?
A: You have 3 ways to order our products and services:
- You can order a Pre-Estimated Service from our online store
- You can call toll free 9 am to 5 pm CST, M-F and ask for an estimate
- You can click the Contact Us button and ask for an estimate
Q. Can I order over the phone?
A. You can order by phone, and send check or pay by invoice. We accept Visa, MasterCard, American Express, Discover Card and check using PayPal. All orders must be prepaid.
Q: What form of payment do you accept?
A: We accept business checks drawn on US banks. No foriegn banks or personal checks please. We accept Visa, MasterCard, Discover, and American Express using PayPal.
if you want to send a business check, we typically wait to start your project until your check to arrives. If a short deadline is involved we suggest UPS or FedEx 2nd day, because it is safe and relitively inexpensive. USPS deliveries make take longer for us to receive.
Q: Are you open for business evenings or weekends?
A: We are available evenings and weekends by appointment.
Q. What is a consultant?
A. A consultant is simply someone who provides specialized expertise, content, behavior, knowledge or skill to assist a client in moving from the status quo to an improved condition. This person can be strictly advisory or provide hands-on services.
Q. What is a coach?
A. Professionals offer coaching on areas of expertise. The most noteworthy is personal coaching, which is a service that helps people accomplish more in life. Services might be time management.
Q. What's the difference between a consultant and a coach?
A. A coach is similar to a consultant. A business consultant helps you understand why a blue bicycle is superior to a red bicycle. A consultant may teach you how to ride the bike, and if necessary, ride the bike FOR you.
Whereas, a business coach helps you understand how and why you want to ride a bicycle. Your coach helps you determine what's holding you back from riding your bike well, and your coach might even jog alongside you as YOU RIDE your bike.
As expert service providers, we offer consulting. But we also offer small business coaching for an Internet business. This means you have a coach/consultant . . . which is the best of both worlds: advice and expertise when you need it, motivation and brainstorming when you're stuck, insight to build you and your business to your highest potential. You have minor consulting with every order for our services. Our small business coach/consultant services do require a fee.
Q. What is marketing?
A. Generally speaking, marketing refers to the activities of a company associated with buying and selling a product or service. A marketing plan may outline advertising, sales and public relations strategies. Messages targeting a specific audience may be delivered to mass markets using newspapers, TV and signage. The four 'Ps' of marketing are product, place, price and promotion. On the Internet, marketing is similar but with different tactics. This is our area of expertise.
Q. What is direct marketing?
A. Direct marketing is the term used to identify the method used to communicate directly with the end user (rather than a mass or general audience). Direct marketing methods are intended to generate a measurable response from a targeted individual. Direct marketing is the cornerstone of our professional web design services business and background. We've provided direct marketing/response strategies for our clients since 1986 using direct mail, catalogs and brochures with order forms. In 1995 we applied those strategies to websites and web stores with tremendous success.
Q. What is Internet marketing?
A. Internet marketing, while different from traditional marketing in terms of the venue in which it takes place, uses strategies founded on direct marketing — as the Internet is a one-on-one direct medium. This means creating online strategies to adopt a combination of methods, such as search engine marketing, directory advertising, pay-per-click advertising, email marketing, affiliate marketing, auction advertising, classified and banner advertising, newsletter advertising, newsletter publication, page ranking, white papers and more. There is no cookie-cutter solution. Every internet marketing strategy is unique.
Q. What is organic marketing?
A. The Internet is a huge marketplace that provides you with the opportunity to reach people locally, nationally and internationally. Organic marketing helps you take advantage of this valuable opportunity utilizing a combination of search engine optimization (SEO) and search engine marketing (SEM). You could see huge growth in visibility and web traffic by optimizing your web pages.
Q. What is search engine marketing (SEM)?
A. Search engine marketing is essential in today's business environment. Your website is basically invisible online without it. If you're like most business owners, you invested a significant amount of money to have your website designed and developed. You think, "If we build it, they will come." The truth is: "If you build it right they will come, provided you do search engine marketing." SEM focuses on one or more of your optimized web pages and invites each search engine to visit the web page and index it in the search engine's database.
There are many search engines, such as Google, MSN, Yahoo. They arrive and leave the scene everyday. Each search engine has its own requirements that must be met in order to be accepted and indexed in their database. Submitting one request is not enough, and submitting too many could be considered spamming the search engine. Knowing how and when to send requests for inclusion and then creating a properly formatted request is called Search Engine Marketing.
Q. What is search engine optimization (SEO)?
A. It may surprise you to learn that many web developers build web sites in a way that actually prevents people from finding the site. Many sites are effectively "invisible" to search engines. Beauty is not good enough to attract web traffic. Search engine optimization (SEO) refers to optimizing your web content and source code to generate free traffic. An optimized web page can attract hundreds of visitors at no cost to you for each click. For example, in the search engine found lists, such as in Google, MSN and Yahoo, SEO delivers traffic to your site but without the "cost of the click." When people click the listing link, traffic is generated free.
Q. What does "cost of the click" mean?
A. "Cost of the click" refers to pay-per-click (PPC) advertising. This means advertisers bid against each other for particular keywords or phrases through an open, automated, bid-for-position system, where the advertisement of the website with the highest bid appears first, with all other advertisers listed in descending bid order. When a person presses the link, it's called a click and depending on the bid amount, the advertiser pays for that click. Creating a listing, bidding and monitoring bidding are what we provide when a client engages our Internet Marketing services (if PPC is part of the client's Internet Marketing strategy).
Q. What is web content?
A. Web content generally refers to everything on the web page that is not development. For example, your web content could mean the copy, images, photos, pdfs, movies and slide shows. Think of a jar of jelly. It's not the jar. Web content, in this example, would be just the jelly.
Q. What is source code?
A. Source code refers to the hidden strings of letters and characters embedded on a web page. Part of your meta system is added to the source code.
Q. What is an Internet marketing consultant?
A. We are internet marketing consultants, and we have the expertise to design a strategy and implement a plan that meets the needs of clients utilizing the Internet. We are both an advisory and hands-on service.
Q. How do your Internet marketing services work?
A. Our services are provided either from our standard pre-estimated models, or based on a budget or desired result that a client requests. Engagements are generally ongoing, but can also be projects targeting a specific outcome, such as an email campaign or one-time online promotion.
Q. Do I have to revise my existing website?
A. If your home page or other web pages are not optimized, you have choices. You can revise your website entirely, or we can develop a "landing page" that is optimized. We discuss solutions with you when you engage our services.
Q. How do I know if the Internet marketing you provide works for my business?
A. It is fairly easy to know if our services are effective. Depending on the engagement, you see the results online by increased visibility and web traffic. In addition to this, depending on your plan, you receive search engine ranking status reports monthly or quarterly.
Q: What is the client questionnaire?
A: The client questionnaire is an input fact form in a Word.doc file that clients may be asked to fill out in order to provide their unique and specific preferences. It is a set of questions to help you provide information our team needs to produce your project focused on the outcome you want. When you use our questionnaire, you don't have to think about what information you might want to tell us. You simply answer the questions, and it's done for you. The questionnaire is primarily utilized for copy and design work where your preferences are key to the successful completion of the project.
Q: How do your professional web design services work?
A: Our web design services are provided either from pre-estimated specifications or based on a custom set of specs you request, as preferred. Once you place an order, we send you a welcome message; ask about your preferences and expectations; and provide any assistance needed to get the project started.
Q: What is the difference between a simple web design, professional website and a Web 2.0 Feng Shui website?
A: A simple web design is cost-effective for business owners who want to focus on generating web traffic without the investment in a complex design. The pre-priced professional web design provides more design and development time needed for your specific design preferences. The difference between a professional website and a Web 2.0 Feng Shui design is simply the extra effort needed to configure site construction based on the principles of Web 2.0 and Feng Shui.
Q: How much is it if I want to provide visitors with more than a point-and-click experience?
A. In this case, web design and development will cost significantly more. For example, adding submission forms and more complex design elements takes more time and consequently increases the number of hours multiplied by our hourly fee. But design alone is not the only factor.
To have any chance of attracting traffic to your site, you need to optimize at least your home page. This means meta tags and key word content in the development stage. In addition, web sites that involve many pages will also add to the bottom line cost. Adding online transactions (ecommerce) could make your bill climb significantly. More complex, customized work that requires a lot of dynamic development time can quadruple costs. We do provide estimates and flat-fee quotes, especially for custom development services.
Q. What's a SKU number:
A. A stock keeping unit, pronounced "skew". Often called part numbers, product numbers and product identifiers. When you have an ecommerce web store, your products have a stockkeeping unit (SKU) number so the database, you and your customers can identify the item easily. You can find the SKU number on the details page of every item in our web store.
Q: What is the difference in the price of web design?
A. One of the common misconceptions is that any website can generate web traffic and become a valuable business asset. People just don't know this is not true and consequently order a website based on price or choose a do-it-yourself option. The problem with this is that these websites are usually not found in search engines. Of those that are found, visitors may not trust a site that is not professionally developed. Plus, it could cost a screaming ton of money to woo traffic to the site.
Creating a web site that actually works hard for the business to generate inquiries and return the investment requires knowledge and experience — and a lot more than just design skills. Keep in mind, you generally get what you pay for.
Q: What are custom development services and what do you need them for?
A. Custom development services are based on your specifications either for a brand new project or to make additions, updates or modifications to an existing project. Lets suppose you want more interaction from your website or web store. Our highly qualified programmers implement necessary changes per your specifications. Custom development can involve a maze of code relationships among various elements. It can be quite complex.
Q: How is development implemented?
A. First of all, you determine the scope of your requirements or changes. We study your requirements and may ask you to clarify some points. We then provide you with an estimate for the project. Once approved, we schedule the work.
Q: What causes delays development time?
A. Delays can be caused by not responding in a timely fashion to comps, drafts, proofs, plans or mockups submitted for feedback and approval. Custom programming takes time, especially on existing sites where the code must first be analyzed before changes can be made. Depending on the level of custom development, we may provide you with intermediate results of work for you to approve or report areas that need correcting to comply with your original specification. After every modification is implemented the project is submitted. You also can test your project as applicable in the development stage. We do our best to communicate with you as often as we can so that the end result satisfies your needs as stipulated in the original specification.
After development is finished, you either confirm that the modifications are made in the way agreed in the original specification, or you note items in the project that need to be corrected in the event that something in the modification is inadvertently left out or does not correspond to the original request as specified.
Please note that once the project you requested is complete, we continue to consult with you as needed. You are welcome to contact us at anytime for any reason.
Q: How do I know I'll like what I get?
A: We provide a client input process that helps you tell us about preferences that shape the graphic design and development of your project. Questions such as "Do you prefer a square or a circle?" are easy for you to answer and give us the insight we need. Depending on your project, you have a series of milestones where we ask for your feedback as your project progresses.
Q: Is there a charge for revisions?
A: You have a check and test period for websites where errors and corrections are made without charge. Understandably, a complete change in creative direction for professional web design services is billable. A change or modification in design, feature or function for custom development is considered a change order and therefore is billable. Graphic design for print generally comes with a reasonable number of revisions included.
Q: Do you offer rush time?
A: We do offer asap and rush service for an addition to the no-hurry standard service hourly fee for professional web design services. These hourly add-ons depend on the date needed, length of production time and inconvenience to existing client orders pending per the schedule.
Q: Do you provide support services?
A: Technical and webmaster support after the check & test period is available as a commercial service for a fee.
Q: What is secure web hosting?
A: A secure server safeguards transactions over the Internet by encoding information passing between computers at different locations. When you utilize a secure server for a shopping cart, for example, your personal information and credit card information are encrypted using Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encryption technology before being sent over the Internet, making it virtually impossible for your information to be stolen or intercepted. Our professional web design services are most concerned with your privacy and security.
Q. What are your terms and conditions?
A. It is good business to set out the terms and conditions of sale for professional services so there are no misunderstandings. Both of us know what is expected, and we both agree as to how we are going to work together. A link to our terms and conditions is posted at the bottom of our home page.
Q. What other services do you provide?
A. We prepare marketing plans and web plans, edit text and write copy for advertising print media, Internet campaigns, search engine marketing, sales letters, newsletters, brochures and web pages. Design services include graphic design, logo design and web design.
We offer specialized expertise to assist our clients in identifying sales and marketing performance issues.We offer troubleshooting, evaluate existing business websites for design flaws, navigation, unproductive response devices, failed sales strategies, tired content and search engine optimization that no longer delivers top ranking. We consult with startups and small business clients in a range of challenges to overcome roadblocks and improve the online sales channel.
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Q. Is there anything not covered?
A. Typically the following services are not covered in an estimate or proposal unless specifically stated in writing: instructions; user manuals; copywriting; search engine optimization; additional web pages; additional comps, site designs, drafts or page layouts; web plans; stock photos; search and/or download images off the web; size/scan/crop/reformat images; manually enter or edit text; or adding products to your inventory for you. These services may be offered as a commercial add-on service.
Q: Is copywriting included?
A: Not everyone wants to engage a professional copywriter in conjunction with design and development services, but copywriting or copy editing can be added to any print or web service. Some of our pre-priced products have full or partial copywriting included.
Q: What is the benefit of hiring professional web design services?
A: The benefit of engaging professional web design services is that web pages are configured correctly for the ever-evolving search engines and changing browser compatibility. Professional web design services will develop the site based on current standards, and will provide behind-the-scenes maintenance.
Q: Why make more than one submission?
A: Submitting to a search engine is different from actually getting into the index. A submission does not guarantee a listing, and a listing does not guarantee a high ranking, nor any traffic. You have only a very small amount of influence over relevancy search engines.
Q: Why 4 or 5 keywords per page?
A: There is a balance needed for each keyword on the page. It doesn't make sense to dilute the power of your important keywords by adding a long string of unoptimized keywords. A lot of keywords on your page does not mean they have any value in the search process. Non-optimized keywords can actually harm your search rankings.
