What are the Requirements for having a Web Site ?

Everyone knows what a Web Site is, but I thought it worth mentioning some of the key issues associated with a Web Site.

Domain Name - A Domain Name helps identify your web site. A Domain Name has to be registered before it can be used. Anyone can register a Domain Name, and there are many companies that you can purchase through. such as Feature Domains. You will have to check the availability of the web site you wish to use. It may already be owned by someone else. The cost will vary depending on who you purchase through and what type you purchase. Usually a Domain Name ending in .COM is cheaper than one ending in .COM.AU. Once you have a Domain Name it has to be configured to point to the server where the web site files are stored. The Domain Name has to be renewed atleast each year and will usually cost the same as the purchase price.

Web Site Hosting - The files for your web site have to be stored somewhere on the internet so they can be accessed by anyone who types in your domain name in their web browser. You are charged either monthly or yearly for the Web Hosting.

There are many aspects to Web Site Hosting, but the main two I wish to mention now are Bandwidth and Disk Space.

• Bandwidth is the volume of data being sent from your web site. Typically this is when someone is viewing one of your web pages that data is sent from the server that is hosting your web site, to the person viewing your web page. Each Account usually has a limit to how much traffic or bandwidth it is allowed to use each month. An average limit is 1 GigaByte per month.

• Disk Space is the amount of available space to store your web pages and files. The more pictures, products and information you store on your web site the more disk space will be required.

  For both of those reasons it is best to optimize your web pages and files, to ensure these are kept as low as possible, which also keeps your fees and charges low.

We can register a Domain Name for you (but we can't guarantee that the one you wish to use is available) and we can perform the Web Site Hosting for you aswell. You will be invoiced each year to cover these two costs.

Can you explain The maintenance Option a little further?

When you purchase a web site design, inevitably you will require changes to be made, such as you may change some of your product details, or you may wish to add new products and remove old products. Your contact details may change if you re-locate to a larger building etc.

So instead of burdening you with having to try and do the changes yourself, we can do them for you. Now charging for every single change does not seem very reasonable, so to resolve this, we simply charge a fixed fee for the duration of the calendar month. This means you can make just one change, or as many as you like for the same price.

Some customers prefer not to receive an invoice each month, so depending on the Package they selected, they can choose, at any time, to purchase additional monthly maintenance contracts in advance.

Important. Maintenance covers the changes to any web pages that currently EXIST. For example you may wish to have products added, removed or edited (such as updated prices) on an existing page. However if you require new products to be added to NEW pages, the creation of new pages is *NOT* covered under the monthly Maintenance option. Check the packages web page where you will see what the cost is for each additional page to be created. The reason new pages have to be treated different is because each new page will also require changes to be made to the menus (where applicable) and to the website search engine. If you request multiple pages at the one time it will work out slightly cheaper for you.

Why so many Prices for the Packages? Shouldn't a Package be one price?

Initally yes, One price might make things look simple. However it is our experience that there are some features which customers may not need, so by having the three main areas as separate options 1. Web Site Development, 2. Web Site Hosting and 3. Web Site Maintenance, the customer has a greater level of flexibility as to what features they actually wish to purchase. If for example a company already has a web site, but would like it to be redesigned, they would not need to purchase the Web Hosting option.

Alternatively, a customer may wish to purchase a Package, but then purchase the Web Hosting in advance for a certain number of years. So having each item separate they can choose to do this.

If you wish to pay the Hosting Fee for multiple years in advance, we will provide an additional discount.

How do I request a Quote, or How do I contact you ?

Goto our Contact us Page. On this page you will find two forms, The first form Feedback allows you to ask general questions. Use the Second form if you wish to ask for a Quote.

How do I use the Shopping Cart ?

Each item that is for sale has two options. First is the Quantity: . This is where you enter the number you wish to purchase, by default this is set to 1 (one).

Next is the Add to Cart button. Once you have entered the Quantity you want to purchase you now click on the Add to Cart button. You will be presented with a popup box to say that item has been added to your shopping cart.

Once you have selected all the items you wish to buy, click on the Shopping Cart menu option. This will take you to the shopping cart which will show you all the items you selected. Here you can review the quantities of each item, or remove any items

Once you are happy with your order, click on the Checkout button that will show you the order form. Fill out the order form and click on Submit. That will email your order to us.

Once we receive your order, we will contact you.

I can't find your list of templates, How do I choose what format to use?

We don't sell templates, instead we choose to design the site to what you want, rather than making the customer choose from a range of templates. This way we feel the customer gets a more unique web site that best suits their company colours, logos or services.

You can have complete control over the layout and design of your pages, or if you do not wish to be burdened with the fine details like that we are more than happy to use our creativity and design a site based on your company logo, colours and type of products or services you provide.

I placed an order for one of your packages but I have now changed my mind. What happens now?

If your change is to another package, then we simply adjust the price to that new package and invoice you for the difference.

If you wish to cancel your order, and work has not commenced on your web site, then we simply refund the amount of money you have paid (this could be the deposit or the full amount if you paid in advance).

If work has already started on your web site, then we will refund you a pro-rata value. So if only a few hours have been completed you would get the majority of your money back, if your web site was nearly completed then you would receive a lower value refund.

I wish to transfer / cancel my Hosting contract with you. What happens now?

If you wish to have a copy of your web site, we can archive it (using compression like PKZIP) and forward it to you, or burn it to CD-ROM and post it to you. That way you won't lose the pages we designed for you.

With the hosting fees, you will receive a pro-rata refund for the number of months remaining. Unfortunately though the domain name fees are either yearly or bi-yearly. This means we can not obtain a refund on that portion of the hosting costs, so we can not offer a 100% refund of the monthly hosting fee, but you should still receive a large portion of it, depending on how many months remain on the domain name registration.

Other companies provide CMS web site solutions, What do you use?

The answer to this question is going to be quite long, so I've decided to document that in the next section of this page.

The main design choice for web sites seems to be based on CMS, which stands for Content Management System (see additional description at Wikipedia). Now at first glance this appears to be a good thing for you, because it allows you to modify your web site "content". Majority of the time this "content" is information about your products. So with you being able to add/remove or modify product information at your leisure should be a benefit?. Correct?.. Well we don't think so.

The first issue would have to be just how easy is it to add a new product?

• In order to make your product descriptions look interesting, you have to choose the font, size, colour and position used for the text, but as most of the CMS programs require these settings to be entered using HTML Codes, you have to know which codes to use. This isn't all that user friendly for the uninitiated.

• You have to add pictures of your products. This sounds easy at first, however pictures have to be:
  • Resized to allow for easy viewing and to make sure they fit on the web page.
  • They have to remain in the correct aspect ratio to ensure they represent your product accurately.
  • They should be optimized to allow your pages to be loaded quickly. If you choose the wrong type of picture format, it could take an extra minute or two for the pages to load. Your web site visitors may not wish to wait, especially if they are using slow internet connections, such as wireless with a laptop, this delay is costing them too much time and money.
  • To also ensure fast viewing, thumbnail images should be created for your product indexes so that only the full size image is displayed when the visitor requests it.

As you can see it is not quite as straight forward as it looks, and why large companies end up employing dedicated website managers just to contend with this potential work load.

We choose not to use CMS design in our web pages and as a result we will perform any web site management you require for a single flat rate fee for the month.

The benefits for you in us doing the changes are:

• Your changes are made promptly and efficiently.

• The changes or additions are professionally done. This helps ensure that your web site remains consistent as you want to ensure that each page is using the same font size, type and colour, plus using the same formatting features.

• Your product pictures will be edited and resized to provide optimum performance but still retaining the highest viewing quality.

So what are the other reasons why we choose not to use CMS? Well it is really about flexibility of design.

• There is no way of knowing what web browser size (or desktop resolution) your web site visitors will be using
  So the last thing you would want to do is frustrate those potential viewers by not supporting their chosen browser window size. What do I mean by that. ok I'll explain.

• The desktop on your computer is set to a specific resolution. This is the number of vertical and horizontal pixels. The default desktop resolution for Windows XP is 800 x 600 (800 pixels wide by 600 pixels high). But the web browser does not have to be used in full screen. Windows 98 had a default desktop resolution of 640 x 480.

With CMS design, they all rely upon templates. These are fixed layouts that are comprised of modules. The issue with this is if you select a template that will cater for people with lower resolutions like 640 x 480, it means that users with high resolutions (like 1280 x 1024) will now only be using half of their screen width, so your web site will look quite lost in the middle of the screen (assuming the template is set for center).

Here is an example of a site designed using CMS that is fixed at 640 x 480, which we were asked to redesign using HTML. When viewed on my monitor at 1280 x 1024, you can see just how inflexible the template system is. Left image is CMS fixed template and next image is HTML viewing a product also at 1280 x 1024 resolution. Finally the right image is viewing that same HTML page, but now at 640 x 480 instead. You can see how the text that was on the right side of the pictures has now gone.. it has floated to below the picture, rather than forcing horizontal scroll bars. ( For your viewing convenience these images have been resized down to 500 x 400 and will open in one new browser window)

Alternately the worst case scenario is that you choose a template that looks great and is a high resolution like 1280 x 800 (widescreen), now what happens when someone with a lower resolution views your web site?.. They get horizontal scroll bars, so in order to see all your web page content they have to constantly scroll left and right for each line of text. That would be very frustrating.

So we design our pages using a Floating format. This means that irrespective of what resolution or web browser window size you are using, our pages will resize to use all the available space. After all a web site is about promoting your products or services, so why not make use of all the available web browser window space there is. You can test this out just with these pages if you like. Go and resize your web browser, make it full screen then reduce it and you'll see the pages will just conform to that size and you will notice the text in between the above thumbnail images float around them. Of course choosing a browser window size smaller than 640 x 480 would not represent any potential visitor. To make it easier for you click these links to open this page in another browser window at the specified size. 640 x 480     800 x 600     1024 x 768    

Of course there are always some pages where the content can't be resized down to very small sizes like 640 x 480, and our Packages and Status pages are two examples where atleast an 800 x 600 width is required. But this is always specific to the type of content found on each page.

• There's no ability to use all available space. Just have a look at how much space on the web page is actually dedicated to the product? Most of the time the CMS template uses upto 60% of the page with other "features" and modules. We believe that once a user selects a product all available space should be used to display that product and not have it cluttered with heaps of extra modules or data down the side columns of the page. Just have a look at the above Extreme CMS image again and you'll also notice that when the content in the side columns ends, it leaves quite a bit of wasted space.

• Portability. Finally, as I'm sure you've probably read enough by now, but we understand that people and business change, so if you wish to move to another server for web hosting at any stage in the future, you can be guaranteed that you can take your web site that we designed with you. Our pages will run on almost any server . If you had a web site designed in CMS, then transferring your site to another server may be a little more complicated. Our web site designs can even auto-run from a cd-rom (they don't even need the internet to work ! ), so you can use that as a type of electronic catalogue, which you can hand out to your customers. We have quite a few clients who do this.