How much should a website cost?

How to budget for a website

You've opened a new business in North Carolina and now you're ready to hit the web with a great website. Having never done this before, you don't really know what to pay. So, like many novices, you surf the web and find great sites with all sorts of cool graphics, order forms, animation and banners and tell yourself "that's for me!"


To create and pay for a functional website (meaning one that does what you want it to do), you must write down what exactly you want it do. That means get a paper and pencil, or open up a word documents and answer this question:


What do I want my website to do?


Next, write down who you think the intended audience will be.


Rank your website in terms of marketing importance. Is it first on your list on how you wil market your business, tenth, last place?


Rate your own experience with the internet and website development. Very experienced or totally clueless.


Take an inventory of your resources. Do you have a professional logo, professional product photos, updated price list, text for the website in word processing format?


How soon do you want the website launched?


Who is going to manage the website after it's launched? (C'mon now, be honest. If you don't know HTML and other web languages, don't expect your web designer to teach you for free). Are you willing to pay for this maintenance?


Now you're almost ready. Next, check with friends, business associates or even competitors in your city or neighborhood and ask for referrals to a good website and internet marketing agency. That's how my company, Digital Business Services, gets most of its new business.


Discuss your background notes with the designer and ask for a detailed estimate. Be prepared to pay a deposit and the balance before the site goes live.


Have them tell you their business practices about billing the customer and ask for examples of their search engine marketing experience.


Each designer has a different pricing approach. But make sure you understand that if you start to make "conceptual" changes, you will pay extra! Example, "hey, I love the layout. Now, can we put some dancing beans on the home page that jump around as the visitor scrolls to make it more exciting?" Sure, but the price just went up.


A small website can cost as little as $700.00, while a large, functional ecommerce site could go into the five figures! Be upfront with your designer regarding your funding abilities. Don't play the cat and mouse game with pricing because it damages trust.


For example, a 10-page "ebrochure," meaning a "static" website with a few forms the visitor can complete will probably cost you about $2,500, unless you hire an advertising agency that insists on producing flash animation, full color comprehensive layouts and lots of big photoshopped images. Then you'll pay $10,000 for the same website.


Give me a call or write if you need help with putting a website budget together. I'd be glad to help.

How to create a robots.txt file

Instructions for creatings a robots.txt file for your website

The robots.txt file tells search engine spiders where NOT to go.
Seems odd, doesn't it? We spend time and money getting Google to find us, but then we have to create a file telling them to stay out of certain folders.
There are some valid reasons for that:

• Your website keeps articles and documents for your staff or students and you don't want them indexed by the search engines. Keep them in a folder on your web server called "articles," then configure your robots.txt file and they won't appear on search engine results pages.


• You are redesigning your website and have a folder called "redesign" on your web server and you don't want the folder indexed because the pages are just "practice" pages.


• You have images you don't want to appear in image searches, so you restrict the "images" folder through your robots.txt file

Creating a robots.txt file is easy. If you don't have an HTML editor, use Notepad that comes with Windows. Remember to save the file with the .txt extension so the spiders can read it. Upload it into the same folder as the rest of your web pages.


You can copy the template below:

# Robots.txt file created by http://www.put-your-domain-name-here.com
# For domain: http://www.put-your-domain-name-here.com

# All robots will spider the domain
User-agent: *
Disallow:

# Disallow directory /test/
User-agent: *
Disallow: /test/

# Disallow directory /picture_library/
User-agent: *
Disallow: /picture_library/


Notice how each entry begins and ends. Copy that as many times as you need for the folders you want restricted. Save as robots.txt, and upload. That's it!


Don't forget to change your robots.txt file as your website grows or you may end up inadvertently allowing the search engines to post pages you don't want on the internet.

Why do I get blank emails from my web site form?

Blank emails are a nuisance and can easily be fixed

This question comes up frequently from web site owners. They receive responses from their web forms except they lack data. No names, addresses, city, state, zip, etc.

What's up with that?

One common cause is a failure to validate the "submit" button on the form. This means your web developer did not put a small slice of code on the web form that will stop the email from going anywhere unless information is entered.

This is a bit different than validating each field, for example, "you must enter an address." This validation comes at the moment the user clicks the "Submit" button.


Confused? Hope not. If you've been plagued by blank email forms, let us know and we'll see if we can help.