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As the World Wide Web becomes more and more accessible,
people are taking advantage of its power to locate the
products and services they want and need. Shoppers can view
and compare offerings and prices with incredible ease and
speed. A website is primarily a marketing tool, to gain
visibility to this vast, world-wide market. People often
turn to the web first to find store hours and locations,
search for news and events, and to find information with
which to make their purchasing decisions. An easy to find,
easy to navigate web site will dramatically increase your
exposure and sales. Because your competitors are always just
a mouse click away, your website must also hold people's
interest and keep them coming back. This is why a well
designed, functional, and appealing web site is a necessity.
Your website can be anything from an "online business card"
or promotional packet to direct people to your business or
organization, to an online storefront where sales can be
made directly.
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A domain name is the name of your website, the "address"
that people will use to view your site, such as
www.coca-cola.com or www.irs.gov. Names are registered
through one of several registrars available, and usually
need to be renewed annually. Many hosting companies provide domain name registration with their web
hosting packages, so you may want to wait to register your
name until after finding a hosting company that fits your
needs.
Domain names can have one of several extensions. The most
widely used and recognized extension is .com, which stands
for "commercial", but there are many others available, such
as .net ("network") and .org ("organization"). You
should find a name that people will easily remember. Many
domain names have already been registered, so finding an
appropriate and effective name is sometimes a daunting, but
extremely important, task.
Lone Dog Creations can help you find and register an
appropriate domain name for your website.
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When someone types in "www.yourwebsite.com" into their
web browser, they are actually sending out a request to
another computer on the internet. A computer called a DNS
("domain name server") translates "www.yourwebsite.com" into
a number, called an IP address, such as 192.168.0.1. This is
the address of the remote server that "serves" the web pages
requested to your website visitor. The server must be
available 24/7 to respond to these requests from all over
the world. When you obtain a web host, you are actually
renting a portion of this remote computer's hard drive in
order to store and serve your web pages.
A good hosting company will provide a high speed connection
to the internet and guarantee close to 100%
"uptime" so your website will always be available. In addition, they will have plans in place in case of
power outages, equipment failure, etc. so your service is
not interrupted.
Plans come in all shapes and sizes. You will need enough
hard disk space to hold your website (this depends on how
much material you will have - audio and video files take up
the most space, followed by photos and graphics, and finally
text). You will also need enough "bandwidth" to accommodate
your anticipated number of visitors and how much data they
will download from the web server.
Other important considerations are the type of server
software used, the type, size, and number of databases
available (if a database is required), how many email
accounts are included, and what type of website usage
statistics are provided.
Lone Dog Creations can help find an inexpensive web host
that will provide all of the services you will require for
your website.
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Lone Dog Creations makes it easy for clients to update
their own website instantly, 24/7, using only a web browser
and an internet enabled connection. You simply log on to
your website control panel using a user ID and password, and
use a user-friendly administrative interface to make changes to
text, add events to your online calendar, post news
articles, update items in your online store, upload new
photos for your photo gallery, upload audio and video files,
and more! Of course, you can always elect to have Lone Dog
Creations make periodic updates to your website for a low
maintenance fee.
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We enjoy what we do, and will transfer this excitement to
your project, resulting in superior quality and faster
turn-around. We are easy to work with, will listen to your
ideas, and will explain any technical considerations in a
down-to-earth fashion. Due to low company overhead, we can
provide
quality work at very reasonable prices. We won't sell you something
we can't
deliver.We are available for you even after the project is
complete, and won't leave you hanging with an unfinished or
unsatisfactory site. We guarantee
all work and won't make you
pay for something you aren't satisfied with.
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If you have an existing logo, brochure, or other
promotional items, Lone Dog Creations can transfer these
items to your webpage to maintain consistency of your
organization's image. We can scan your photographs and use
your ideas and our own to come up with custom borders,
navigation buttons, and backgrounds. Custom graphics design
and logo design is available for an additional fee. Also,
there are literally thousands upon thousands of free and
fee-based images, animations and photographs available for
download on the internet. Lone Dog Creations can help you
locate and select from online image libraries that will help
promote the theme of your website.
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There are many ways to promote your website, from online
marketing efforts such as trading links with other websites,
purchasing "pay-per-click" links on high traffic sites,
optimizing your site for maximum exposure to the major
search engines, and offline (print) marketing. Contact
Lone
Dog Creations for a free consultation. Of course, once
someone finds your website, the actual content is what will
keep people there, and make them want to tell their friends about it. Keeping
your website fresh with new information, products, and
services is key. Oftentimes, it is helpful to include
non-sales content (industry news, tutorials, etc.) to
establish your site as a source of current information.
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First, you must set up an online storefront to display
your products and information. This usually entails taking
high quality photographs of your products and uploading them
to the store, and selecting a shopping cart mechanism for
keeping track of your customer's selections. There are many
shopping carts available, some for free, or you can have
custom shopping cart software developed. If payments are going to be
made online (via a credit card or electronic check) you must
also sign up for a merchant account with one of several
credit card processing companies (such as Authorize.net or
PayPal). There are many options available for keeping track
of orders and customers. Contact
Lone Dog Creations for more
information on e-commerce solutions available.
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An Electronic Press Kit, or EPK, is basically a mini
website that showcases your band or organization, much like
an electronic resume. EPK's are usually small enough to send
as an email attachment, and are oftentimes created as a
self-contained, bootable CD ROM or mini CD (i.e. CD business
cards). For musical acts, an EPK usually contains a sampling
of the music, a band biography, promotional photographs, a
list of venues played, and oftentimes a sample setlist or
two, all laid out in an appealing, easy to navigate format.
EPK's are becoming more and more the norm, and some venues
and festivals won't even consider a band without an EPK.
Lone Dog Creations can design a custom EPK for your band
using either HTML or FLASH technology. For more information,
contact Lone Dog Creations.
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Basically, the cost of the website is dependent on how
much work the web designer has to do. If you have a solid
idea, organization, and all your materials and graphics
ready ahead of time, it can be done relatively quickly and
inexpensively. Many web design shops base their prices on an
hourly rate of $75 to $100. Because of low overhead, Lone
Dog Creations can still be profitable while charging an
hourly rate of $40. A basic five page design, including
navigation development, layout, and features setup
(including your own control panel for making updates) will
cost around $400. Additional pages, graphics development,
custom programming, custom animations, file upload, scanning
and image processing, and content development are based on a
rate of $40/hour. Contact
Lone Dog Creations for a custom
quote.
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You will need a solid idea of what you want to accomplish
by having a website. Also helpful is an idea of your vision
of the organization of the site - for example what the main
pages will be, what features you want, etc. Lone Dog
Creations can help you define your goal for the website. You
will also need content for your site - written text, images,
captions, audio and video files, and store products. Basic
clipart, borders, logos, and navigation buttons are
provided with your website design. Advanced graphics design,
logo design, and animation are available for an additional
fee. Lone Dog Creations can also help organize and compose
your text and other content for an additional fee. The more
organized you are, the faster and cheaper the web
development process will be. If you have no idea what you
want, Lone Dog Creations can help, but only a reasonable
amount of revisions can be included in the price of a basic
design.
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We discuss the website project with the client and
determine the scope of the project in order to quote an
accurate price and time frame. Some things that need to be
decided at this time are the general outline of the site
(number of pages, features desired, etc.), whether there
will be any online sales, space requirements, and what
additional graphics and/or animations may need to be
designed to support the site. Once an agreement is made, we
will need to obtain a web host and register your domain name
if this has not already been done (Lone Dog Creations does
NOT provide website hosting, however we can recommend
several excellent partners for these services). The names of
each page need to be decided on at this time, as well as the
overall site organization (how the user will navigate through the
site). During the initial design phase a non-functional "web
page mockup" will be designed and adjusted to the client's
specifications. When a design is agreed upon, the actual
pages are then developed. At this point, the client will
need to provide text and media (audio, video, photos, etc.)
as required for the project in order to proceed in a timely
fashion. Once the site is developed, we will make any last
minute changes or adjustments (major changes at this point
will be subject to an additional fee). Then the site "goes
live" to the world wide web! Any technical flaws or small
adjustments will be dealt with as needed to ensure a
flawless experience for the website visitor.
Once the website is up and running, the client will be able
to update web content using the custom Lone Dog control
panel for his/her site. Additional website maintenance
and/or modifications are available for a small maintenance
fee.
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There are many commercially available software packages to monitor
website statistics, such as number of visitors to your
site, what time of day people come to your site, which
websites they are coming from, etc. Many hosts provide extensive web
analyzing tools as part of their hosting package. If your host does not provide these
services, please contact
Lone Dog Creations as other options
may be available.
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Many features of dynamic web sites (web sites that have
continually changing and current content) use one or more
databases to function. An events calendar may pull its data
from a database of events and display them in chronological
order. A guestbook or online forum pulls its "posts" from a
database. An online store keeps all its product information
(photos, description, and prices) in a database, keeps its
customer information in another database, and sales orders
in a third. These databases are stored remotely on a secure
server, usually, but not always, on the same server as your
web page itself. Many features provided by Lone Dog
Creations require a database to function, such as MySQL.
Additional functionality requested by the client may also
require a custom database and additional custom software to
access and use the data.
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Dynamic content is any part of the website that will need
to be updated periodically. During the design process, we
will decide what parts of the webpage will need to be
changed, and that functionality is built into the design.
Some items, such as the navigation bar and some animations,
may not be easily update-able, and this will be discussed
during the initial interview. Dynamic content typically
includes text, photos and other media, and some graphics.
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Our bottom line is that we want happy customers and good
references. Although we have yet to gain a disappointed
customer, if for some reason we find that we cannot work
together, a full refund of any down payment or retaining fee
will be issued.
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Many times the limiting factor has been how fast a client
can deliver the needed material (photos, text, etc.) We have
put up complete, quality web pages before the domain name
even resolves! (usually 48 hours). A fair, conservative
estimate is about a week for small projects not requiring
customized programming or graphics.
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One major obstacle to web design is a lack of absolute
standards that all machines will adhere to. Many web
browsers display information differently, and some more
advanced programs designed for one type of web browser may
not even function on another! A good web design must be
aware of these differences, and oftentimes compromise is
necessary to reach the largest audience. The situation may
be likened to the earlier days of television. Some people
had color TV's, but if your program didn't also look good in
black and white, you would alienate a portion of your
audience. Some major limitations in web design are:
designing sites that will also look good on smaller screen
sizes (which often makes the site seem "too small" on a
large screen), and file size (dial up users who get their
web pages at 1-2K per second may not want to wait for a 2000K
photo to download). Lone Dog Creations strives to make its
web pages accessible to the most viewers, and tests its
designs on a variety of web browsers (Internet Explorer,
Netscape, FireFox, and Opera).
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A large percentage of your website visitors may find your
website through a "search engine" such as Google or Yahoo!
These engines routinely "surf" the internet and are
constantly updating their databases to accurately index all
sites on the internet, much like a huge library card
catalog. They are designed to index their results based on
"keywords" that they find contained in the web pages they
search, so when someone types a certain keyword or keywords
into a search engine, it can display accurate results,
usually in the order of relevance (or how often the keyword
is found in the webpage) Search Engine Optimization has
become huge business, as typically someone who is searching
for a particular keyword will only view the first page or
two of results, and having your site come up near the top of
the list is crucial. Many designers have tried to "trick"
the search engines by filling pages with nothing but
keywords, but search engine programmers have caught on to
this trick and often permanently ban these websites
permanently from the lists, which is not a good thing at
all. At Lone Dog Creations, we can help optimize your site
for maximum visibility to the search engines, using keywords
that are relevant to your product or service. We can also
help submit your web pages to the major search engines,
letting them know you are "online". We recommend
using a lot of
relevant content, in text format, on the home or top level
pages for maximum search engine friendliness.
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