About website design work I do

More and more, websites are becoming an integral part of any successful business’ marketing plan. In the majority of cases, the site is not necessarily the primary source of sales, but instead its a key supplement to other marketing strategies. Such as the www link located in a newspaper or magazine ad, or included in a flyer, poster or mailer, or on your business card or in your telephone directory listing. Potential customers get inticed with these other marketing methods, but then can pursue the details of your offering in the comfort of their home, on their own time schedule. The website also works terrifically in conjunction with telephone sales, since you can walk the person thru a presentation simply by having them go to your website during the conversation.

Now I am primarily doing WordPress websites, utilizing iThemes Builder, which will enable you to do most updates yourself, once you get the hang of the WordPress admin dashboard.  More complex WordPress modifications I can do for you.  I have over 70 different highly customizable child themes that work with the builder parent.  You can see all the themes I have here.

For those of you that want to design and build your own wordpress site, I can’t recommend iThemes more.  Their Builder parent theme is a base template that makes creating and modifying your site so much easier and it comes with around 70 child themes and a style manager so you can change your CSS without knowing how to code.  Their various plugins including Backup Buddy (which is a must have) are amazing.  Plus the iThemes support and education is available to help you solve any issues you might run into.  Through their affiliate education company WebDesign.com they offer complete training in all aspects of WP including php, css and more.  I use them exclusively for all my WP sites.

For website creation cost, I feel this link can give you an idea of the range and variables involved in pricing a site.  It describes three types of sites and as you can see from the article it can range from $1,000 to over $10,000.   Monthly maintenance can be as little as $30/mo to $500/mo depending on how much promotion and day to day updating you would require me to do for you. If you choose the WordPress site you can do most updates yourself.  Give me a call at 530.346.9968 and by discussing what your needs are I can be in a better position to give you a ball park estimate.

Other website costs:

Domain Name:
First you will need to get a domain name. Bluehost gives you one free domain name with your hosting account. LunarPages also gives you a free domain name for 1 year.  Then you can buy additional names for around $10/year thru NameCheap.com. So you can get started with everything  right  at Bluehost. Also, below I have  provided a place where you can enter various domain name choices to find out if they are available. Note, I am compensated from Bluehost, Lunarpages and Namecheap for referrals.

For search engine optimization it helps to have keywords in your domain name.  Here is a link to a Google keyword tool that gives you statistics on how often various keywords are used in searches.

Webhosting:
Next you will need to get a webhost. This is where all your website files will be uploaded to and made available to the world. I have been using both  Bluehost  and LunarPages. They are both easy to use, have an excellent admin panel, 24/7 tech service, provide tons of bandwidth and storage space, lots of emails, mySQL database and numerous other goodies all for $5-7/month, paid two years at a time. I have been using them on many clients for the last 10 years or so, and I can’t even remember them being down once.

To aid in choosing color schemes I have created a color page with links to various sources for picking colors.

Examples of the various websites I have built are in my portfolio here.

If you need to use your credit card for payment, I have a PayPal account here.

Call me at 530.346.9968 or email me with any questions or concerns.