Information. People use the internet to gather information about products, services and companies, you. Some of the more popular activities include purchasing online, comparing prices and services and finding your contact details.
Having a professional website your customers and potential customers can find out who you are any what you stand for.
By making user manuals, forms and information about your products and services available on your website you can cut costs. If you have dozens of people gathering their information form your website rather than having to post it you can cut out your printing costs and mailing costs.
If you want to project a sense of professionalism you need a professional to do your work. If your car was broken and you knew little about mechanics would you try and fix it yourself or take it to a garage for a professional to work on it. It is the same for your website.
Many times your website might be the first time a potential customer makes contact. Your website shows them who you are and how professional you are.
There are many factors that need to be taken into account when developing a website that can only be learnt from experience. There are many websites out there that are very poorly designed and developed. These websites will loose business.
The number one secret to a fast loading website is optimisation. Many websites are poorly made making them take, what seems like forever, to open each page.
Two keys to success practiced by murraybarnes.com are to use text where possible instead of images and to optimise images effectively for the internet.
Just one poorly optimised image can make the difference between your web page opening in 25 or 30 seconds or more compared to a couple of seconds if done properly. If you have 10 or more pages on your website that means a website visitor is spending a huge amount of time waiting for your website to open and are more likely to leave and go else where.
No. All websites developed by murraybarnes.com are hard coded. Hard coding is the process of hand writing the necessary code to make a page appear on the internet rather than using WYSIWYG, What You See Is What You Get, software such as Microsoft FrontPage and Macromedia Dreamweaver. The advantage of hard coding is a faster loading website, higher quality code and less to go wrong.
Every website looks a bit different from computer to computer due to the different types of hardware like monitors and video cards and versions of software like version 5 or 6.
Most people would not be able notice the difference if your website has been developed correctly. A couple of main faults include not using web safe colours and not the web developer not programming your code to be cross browser compatible. (work in both Internet Explorer and Netscape)
murraybarnes.com mainly develops with the following components. There are other components that are need to create a website however these are the widest used:
- HTML - Hyper Text Markup Language - is the name of the coding language used to create web pages. HTML has progressed from its' early days however is still quite restrictive. HTML is used with many other components like PHP, CSS, JavaScript, Flash and so on to create interesting and stimulating website content.
- PHP - Hypertext Pre-processor - is the name of the coding language that serves as a hub to interact with your mySQL database. It allows your website to be interactive and allows you to update your website yourself amongst other things.
- mySQL - mySQL is a SQL (Structured Query Language) database used with PHP. Database driven websites are more flexible than a static website.
- CSS - Cascading Style Sheet - A CSS is the current way of adding styles... fonts, sizes, colours etc to your website. With the update to HTML 4 a lot of code was made obsolete and CSS took the place. CSS are a powerful tool. With changing 1 file you can change the look and feel of an entire website.
- JavaScript - JavaScript is another programming language used to enhance HTML. JavaScript helps make your web pages dynamic by adding functions like popup boxes and image rollovers (when a image changes from one to another).
- Macromedia Flash - Flash is a fantastic vector-based web design software program. It allows interactive graphics and content that is not available with HTML. You need to have the free Flash player to view Flash which millions of computers currently have.
Yes. It is more professional having your own domain name. e.g. http://www.yourname.com instead of a free domain name such as http://www.geocities.com/yourname
- You create an identity that belongs to you.
- It is easier for people to remember a domain name that is relevant to you.
- Having your own domain name is more professional.
- You can have your own email addresses at your domain. e.g. you@yourname.com and me@yourname.com.
- You can change your internet service provider and retain your email addresses.
Yes. You can have whatever you what. murraybarnes.com is here for you and will create anything you wish.
This depends on you and the flow of the information between you and us. The faster you respond to our requests the sooner your website will be ready.
Small websites can take a matter of days to develop however large websites can take weeks or even months to develop. An average 8 page website generally takes 5 days or so.
Contact murraybarnes.com with details of what you want for a timeline.
The more leg work you do the cheaper your website will be. If you write all your own content and supply all your own images then your website will be cheaper than if murraybarnes.com does it.
Ongoing costs depend on what exactly you need. Costs include
- The annual fee to use your domain name. That varies from approximately US$10 to US$50 per year depending on what type of domain name you have.
- Web hosting, the place your website lives. This varies depending on the size of your website and what type of backups you want. Expect to pay from US$20 plus per month.
- Additional development. Websites developed by murraybarnes.com allow you to make updates and add content yourself at no extra charge depending on what options are developed. Adding extra functionality to your website will incur an additional charge.
murraybarnes.com will contact you to discuss exactly what you want your website to do and document everything. A fixed price and specification document will be created and when accepted the development will begin.
Definitely not. murraybarnes.com does business with people and companies all over the world. In this day and age of the virtual world there are no business boundaries.
Once your website is live you have to let people know that it is there. You will never get visitors if you don't tell people about your website.
Include your website address on all advertising, letterheads, business cards, invoices, receipts, yellow pages, flyers, coupons, basically anywhere that you put your company name put your website address as well.
Other than putting your website address where ever you have your business name one of the main keys to the success is word of mouth. Tell as many people as you can to visit your website.
All websites developed by murraybarnes.com are submitted to the larger search engines such as Google, Hotbot, Lycos, Yahoo and others.
The majority of websites developed by murraybarnes.com can be updated by you through your content management system at no extra charge.
If you want additional functionality added to your website please contact murraybarnes.com for a quotation.
murraybarnes.com updates websites whether they have been made by us or not.
Definitely. All you need is access to your web server and as long as all the files needed are there then there is no problem doing whatever you want.
Definitely. There are many ways to revive a slow or dead website. It may just be a case of a minor content restructure or the sake of advertising your site more effectively. Alternatively your site might need a major over haul to make it more professional and user friendly.
If you would like our opinion and help please contact murraybarnes.com.
