Web Design
If you look at your website as an employee, you can consider "What can the website do for me?" To maximize the return on investment when building a website, consider all the tasks a website could do for you. With a little bit of thought, a website can pay for itself many times over in labor savings and increased revenue.
Website FAQs
What is the Web Design Process?
Function DiscoveryInitially Web4u collects information from you such as your current business model and your initial thoughts about how the website will work. A discussion takes to place to ensure the website is designed with the features that will make it work the best for you. Design Discovery
Then, some discussion takes place about color scheme, style, logos, etc. A good place to start is by selecting a few websites you like. Note what you like about them and what you don't. Very often a customer will like the color scheme of one website, the layout of another, and a particular functionality of a third. Initial Design
Web4u takes all the input into consideration and then creates a design in Photoshop. The initial design will be a jpg image and not a functioning website yet. At this stage you will see the design and be allowed to make tweaks and adjsustments based on the number of revisions allowed in your contract. Building the Website
Once the design is approved, the building of the website and all its pages will be completed. After the pages are completed the content and functionality can be tweaked according to the quanity of revisions allowed in your contract for this phase.
How long does the process take?
The design preview is usually generated in 5 business days or less. The approval and adjustments stage may vary based on the number of adjustments. The building phase for a 10 page basic website takes about another 5 business days. Building for a website with complicated features can of course take longer.
How much does a website cost?
If you are in a place with your business where quality and long-term relationships matter, then we suggest you consider talking with us. While we did some very cheap websites in the early days, for the most part we've moved on to serving professional clients with successful organizations that wish to invest in their web technologies. This doesn't mean some good deals haven't been given away from time to time, but it does mean we're a serious company here to work with serious clients.
What about images and content?
Content is often provided to Web4u in a Microsoft Word document or similar. You can separate the pages of your website in the Word document with a nice line and bold headings for the title of each page. This way you can send one word document for your entire website. If you have a particular image you'd like to appear on a particular page, note the image name in the word document and send the image as an attachment in an email. We can't easily copy and paste the images from the Word document to the website so you don't need to insert them into the Word document.
What about web hosting, domain names, and email?
Web hosting is renting space on servers that are accessible to the internet all the time. When you pay for web hosting is it like paying for rent for your little store to be available to the internet at all times. Web hosting rates begin around $15/month for starter websites. We can use your web hosting if you already have it. However, reasons to consider using Web4u hosting are our speed and ease of access to our servers. Sometimes clients keep their own hosting but then forget to renew their credit card on file with their hosting company. A few months go by and the client asks Web4u to make a change. Web4u can't login because of the client's credit card change and the client then has to call the web hosting comopany directly and settle the problem. In the mean time the website login has been changed and Web4u has to wait for the login. Unfortunately the time Web4u spends troubleshooting problems with other company's hosting has to billed as hourly work because the servers are not ours. It is often faster and easier for everyone if Web4u's servers are used. However, Web4u still happily serves clients websites on other servers. We just thought it fair to share the downside of using another party's servers.Domain names are what is typed into the browser to retrieve your webstie, such as www.web4uonline.com. Domain names are included in the web hosting price. We can use your own domain name if you already have one.
Email can be setup at your domain name such as info@web4uonline.com. Setting up at least one email address at your domain name is a good idea because it looks much more professional than johnsbusiness@bellsouth.net.
Can't I just build a website myself?
We understand your desire to save money and be in control. However, many of our customers felt the same way until they spent 80 hours working on their website only to create a product that did not reflect the professionalism of their business. After out sourcing the web design to Web4u they felt relieved and proud of the new quality design to represent their organization. It is also worth considering what the time spent on attempting to build your website could create in terms of revenue if you dedicated the time to selling. Many times a business owner is better off selling a few more products to pay for the website than attempting the webstie on his/her own.With that being said, there are some clients who have enough technical savvy that they could put together a starter website with a little direct guidance. For those clients we do offer Web Design Courses and one on one conulsting. Our beginner course is well worth the price for anyone.