Building a website? What you need to know.

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You'll find it's a considerable amount of work to prepare your company's materials for your upcoming website project. Think of your webmasters as your company's graphic designers. You supply the raw materials and we assemble them onto graphically pleasing, easy-to-read Web pages.

Steps
(these are in no particular order, they are just a guide to help with your site creation.)

• We insert “meta tags” into the site, which are hidden keywords that the search engines look for. Please put together a list of as many words (or combinations of words) that you think anyone looking for your website would type into a search engine. Please make these keywords comma separated.
  (i.e.  printing, brochure printing, cheap printers, Miami printers, etc.)
• We also need a sentence or two about your company, which is also to be used as part of the search engine submissions.
  

Text / Content / Pages

• You must set up a separate document for each web page.
• We prefer Microsoft Word, though we can convert a wide variety of file types.
• Please do not send us a draft of your text, send us your final version. While we expect to make minor changes here and there after the web pages are prepared, it takes extra time to continuously edit text.
• Please do not send everything you have and ask us to pick out the relevant information. We do not know what is relevant to your company, and may put in the wrong information.
• Depending on which website package you have, you will have a certain amount of main pages on your new site. We need you to start thinking about the names and content for each of those pages.
• If your site includes sub pages you will need to think about the names for those as well. (for drop downs, sub menu’s, etc)
• i.e.  Home, About Us, Contact Us, Etc.
  

Images/Graphics

• If you have any company business cards or brochures, please send them to us via email or post. This helps us get an idea of how your company is visually represented.
• The quality appearance of your website is based a lot on the photos or graphics you choose for your web pages. Clipart can be used, but tends to make the pages look amateurish. Photos are usually the best.
• Please send any images / logos that you require on your site to us in digitized form, via e-mail or on a CD mailed to us.
• If you don’t have the images you would like, please send us a description of the type of image you would like and we will search our stock image library to find something that is suitable. Stock images are included free in your site package.
• If you need us to prepare specialized graphic elements in addition to our custom site graphics package, please explain clearly, and perhaps include a sketch. We charge for such items on an hourly basis.
• To assist us in finding a style that you like, please search the web for websites that you like and email their links to us. Please also tell us what you like about each one (layout, color scheme, functionality, etc). It may help you to also take a look at your competitors sites to get ideas of what you should AND should not do on your new site.

Contact Us/Forms/questionnaires

• Please let us know which email address the contact us/questionnaire form is going to be emailed to when the customer hits “submit”
• If you have multiple fields going in to the form submit/questionnaire, please send us a list of the fields. (Fields are the empty boxes that the customer fills in on your form)
• i.e.  Name, Address, How did you hear about us?, email, etc.

Email Accounts

• If you have purchased hosting with your website package, we will need to set up your various email accounts. 
• Please send us the email addresses that you would like.
  (i.e. sales@yourdomain.com, info@yourdomain.com, etc.)

Your Domain

• Your domain is the www.------.com name that people type in to find your site. Please, when thinking of a name, remember that most people hate to type and most are not the greatest spellers, so don’t go for a huge domain that no one will type out or may, misspell.
• Imagine you are telling someone over the phone what your domain is.  How easy is it to get across?
• Bad Idea: www.thegreatesthairsalonintexas.com
  Good Idea: www.texashair.com
• To search domain availability click here domain search