frequently asked questions
Website Design for Small Businesses and Organizations
Here's what I can say from long experience:
Anonymous websites do not elicit trust.
Your site 
should include images of your own people - the ones who make the business turnover and run. It should also include images of real products, facilities, premises, and services in action. No generic images of smiling receptionists with telephones or "button down collars and ties" standing around a computer or board room table like the one at the left - nothing phoney. Feature the management, the facilities, the location, the products and the workers.
Basic Principles for Sites that Sell Goods and Services
Keep your content simple, focused and on message. Emphasize your management, your employees, your products and services, your location and how to contact and find you. Emphasize your unique competitive advantages. Never exaggerate. Your website is a key promotional tool that builds and enhances your brand. Feature your logo, your accomplishments, your responsiveness to customers, your standing in the market, your track record and the length of time you've been in business. Whether to put pricing information on a webpage is up to you and depends on the type of business your operate. Build trust....
Keep your website clean, neat, well organized and free of clutter. Stay away from extraneous gadgets, off subject button links, loud colors, blinking animations and scrolling banners.
Keep your website current. The minute someone sees that you have not touched your website in any way in many days or even months, they will abandon you. A website should not be too "busy", but it should be dynamic and active. New content should be added (to please the Google bots that rank you for one thing) and images should be updated and standardized as to size and rendering as much as possible.
Maintain a consistent style that is compatible and complementary to your branding message
Your website fonts, writing styles and color choices could well mirror your company stationary and business cards. Your logo should be rendered on your site at high resolution and placed on the page in a consistent manner at one standard size. Your website is no different than your company brochure and in a sense it is a web-extention of that brochure in terms of how you wish your company to be seen by outsiders. The main difference is that the webpage will be a online brochure designed to sell your products and services, service and support old customers and generate new customers.
Mobile Phones and Mobile Friendly Websites
A potential customer has to be able to reach your site and your place of business with his mobile phone in the very least number of steps possible from the web. Can you be found quickly on Google, Yahoo or Bing?
Make your website mobile-friendly with a redirect to your mobile site. You need a regular site and a simple mobile site to be found. Do you feature on Google Places on the first page in your business catch area. Are you on the map? If you are on the map, can a customer use 'directions' on his phone to drive to you? You need to have smart maps on both your main website and your mobile website - that work!
Make sure they find you - Most websites are not easily viewable from mobile phones. We design or modify sites so that the mobile viewer who lands on your main website is automatically redirected to your second mobile-friendly site which is designed specifically to allow that viewer to either call you, Email you or find you directly on the map and navigate directly to your place of business.
Google Rankings
There are only two things you can do, realistically, to boost your rank on Google. Spend money on promotion and encourage others to link to your site. There is actually a third thing --- have your site on the air for a long time......
Having relevant well organized content helps and the right META tags in your head section won't hurt, but don't expect to rise to the top of any search engine until your site has been on the air for quite a while. If your target market is local, however, the situation is much brighter.
There is hope locally - Rising to the first page on Google and getting a pin on their map for your business category in your area is now quite achievable with Google Places. We will optimize this service for you and make sure you can be found fast locally.
If your target market is continental or international, however, and you sell off your site, we can optimize your site to achieve a higher search engine ranking, particularly on Google. We were closely involved Search Engine Optimization for over five years while PyramidCam was live from the Pyramids and receiving sometime tens of thousands of hits a day. While we were developing the Confederation of African Football site, we sometimes received millions of hits over a big football weekend. The objective there was protection, not optimization. We have extensive experience in this area.
Google Places, Google Maps and Directions
As mentioned previously, you can still play in Google Places locally if you sign up (free) and do all the right tweaks and set all the right switches. If your clients and customers are local or even regional, you really don't care that much about your Google page rank - you can still have impact locally. Google may pick up your site automatically put you on Google Places but you will need to sign up, receive a ID number and then optimize your listing. We will do that for you.
Making money from your site through third party ads
You need hits, lots of hits to do this. Your website is your quality brochure and the first look that many people will have at you and your business. Don't cheapen it with ads if you can help it - that's a diversion from your core business. Google Ads can be beneficial as an on-the-side money maker if you have at least 5000 hits a day or more, but stay away if you can help it. Ads dilute your message and can even compete with your business as it's difficult for you to control what ads appears on your site. We can place ads on your site, teach you how to control them and make them conflict as little as possible with your site layout and content - if you really have to.
Website Hosting
It's very likely that you are paying too much for web hosting right now. If you are paying anybody (third party consultant) anything over $5 a month you are paying too much. The competition is so fierce in this business sector that you will be able to have everything you need (bandwidth, databases, Email addresses, PHP, technical support and free add-on programs) for 3 to 5 dollars a month. We know some reliable hosting outfits and setting you up on them free of charge is what we'll do. Costs in this area are sensitive to bandwidth. You will get all the services you need if your bandwidth stays reasonably low, but if your site starts getting hit hard because you just invented cold fusion, for example, expect a large cash call from your host. If you are a local business or service you will get by for years on minimal hosting and it will become even cheaper.
Domain Names
Your well-balanced will cost you from a $1 to $10 a year for registration. It can be with the same company that provides your hosting (makes it somewhat easier), but does not have to be. Originally all domain names were registered with Network Solutions, but most hosting companies can sell you a domain name or will even include it in the cost of your hosting in some cases.
The problem is that you may not find the name you desire available. You will have to become creative to find a name that is both relevant to your business interests and short enough to be practical and usable. Consider the first part of your domain name as a keyword of sorts: www.widgetsinternational.com, for example. For promotional purposes insert your business name in there somehow. In some cases, the .COM for the name you would prefer is taken but you can still buy the .ORG, .NET, .INFO,. MOBI, BIZ or US for your preference. You can also consider a hyphenated domain name. They are not considered as 'cool' as a dot com but you may be able to obtain a better looking, shorter and more easily recognized domain name this way. There are a lot of other factors involved in the choice - we can advise, we've registered hundreds of names over the years. We've also let some real winners go because we did not think they would ever amount to anything. If you are willing to take a suffix other than .COM, you can get just about anything your want.
SEO (Search Engine Optimization)
As I've said before, doing a thorough SEO on your website will not guarantee that viewers will flock to your site. But as a matter of best practices, your site should be optimized: META tags, descriptive keywords, meaningful titles over all content paragraphs, alt tags for all images - these are the major concerns. Stay away from excess padding, invisible keywords on the home page and other tricks: Google knows them all and if your are caught not playing by the rules in an attempt to raise your ranking, you could be blacklisted by Google. This will be very bad news, indeed.
We install Google Analytics on every site we build and it's all you will need to know who comes to your site, from where and how often. There are other tools available on Analytics that will help us tune your site to be Google compliant in all regards. Of course Google is only one of the principle search engines and you should be registered for Yahoo and Bing as well.
Social Networking
Facebook and Twitter may or may not be appropriate for your operational or promotional needs. Much of what is written about using Facebook as a promotional tool for business is pure hype, but some don't agree. Look at this page - 32 Ways to Use Facebook for Business and see if any of these uses might just fit your business. If you have a loyal customer base that you have already signed up for Email newsletters and product announcements, for example, you can easily integrate Facebook and Twitter into the mix. Building a bulletin board or Forum should probably be the first step in your social networking activities, which is just basically good customer relations and support.
Content Management Systems
A CMS is just another kind of website that provides an administrative panel to allow you, the owner, to manage your own website:
A web content management system (WCMS or Web CMS) is a content management system (CMS) software, usually implemented as a Web application, for creating and managing HTML content. It is used to manage and control a large, dynamic collection of Web material (HTML documents and their associated images). A CMS facilitates content creation, content control, editing, and many essential Web maintenance functions.
There was a time when anyone who wanted any changes made in their website had to ask a webmaster or consultant to do those changes and was charged by the hour accordingly. You had to pay this 'medicine man' to run your site. It's still the case with many, however if anyone in your organization can be trained up on Dreamweaver or FrontPage (web design software packages), you can quite easily and inexpensively manage your site without any third party help. In that case, perhaps your secretary, or even you the owner, can manage your website.
CMS packages are more appropriate for larger organizations with many customers and/or internal users. They most always need at least one trained technical person to provide administration and training either in-house or through an outside consultant. If you have employees who work at home or in the field and your content changes a great deal from day to day, consider installing one. Otherwise beware. If you try it yourself you will always bite off more than you can chew. For small to medium businesses we have a solution that will allow you or your staff to change content on any part of your site at will without getting deeply involved in any CMS packages. If needed, we can install and manage systems like Druple, Joomla or WordPress. Keep it simple.
Webcams and Security Surveillance Systems
For promotional and security reasons, put a like webcam on your business. We built PyramidCam, the only online live webcam in Cairo which was used to promote tourism in Egypt and allow people around the world who would never visit Egypt the opportunity to view the Pyramids in color at 30 second intervals. Many have joked to us that we were the only people providing a live security system for the Pyramids. Go to www.pyramidcam.com to view some of the fantastic images we captured over a 5 year period. You can enhance your website by providing a live view of your premises, street or unique picturesque view from your office by installing a live IP camera. We would be happy to carry out a demonstration at your office or home.
Bells and Whistles
What else can we do for you?
Forums, WordPress blogs, photo albums, mySQL databases, professional photos taken for your site, newsletters, PDF file presentation; conversion of books and documents to Kindle format, site search program; comment and guest book modules, shop fronts using PayPal and credit cards, original graphic mastheads and banners, Google ads, Google Places, Google Analytics, smart maps for directions, Geographical Information Systems with graphical maps, GPS tracking and location, surveys, balloting, CMS and network security auditing.
Our Aims
- Provide our customers with a modern looking and unique state-of-the-art website that that can be managed in-house without ongoing third party charges
- Lower your current web-related costs
- Improve your promotional and marketing impact locally
- Assure that your potential local customers find you and your business on the net and particularly from their mobile phones
- Make you independent and cost effective with regard to all your Internet operations.
