Web Design & Hosting

Our approach to offering web design services focuses on teaching you what you need to understand and be able to do in order to manage and maintain your own website. Here’s Lesson 1:

The Three Things You Need In Order to Have a Website:

  1. A domain name
  2. A web hosting account 
  3. The content itself —your text, images, etc.

We can help with all three!

  • We can register your domain for you if you like, or help you with the process. (It’s best if you register your own domain; that way you have control over it and we are not “playing middle man”…) Domain name registration costs around $12-15/year —around $1 a month— per domain name. (You might want a few names; we can explain why…)
  • We can also host your website, or assist you with choosing a hosting company. Many companies charge $100 or more per month for hosting —with virtually no support— but we offer hosting with support for less than that.
  • And while you need to provide the content, we can help with writing and editing, as well as preparing photos and other graphics for the web.

We look forward to speaking with you about your website needs, and see how we can help. An initial consultation (by phone, Skype, email or in person) of up to an hour or so is always free, during which time we can clarify what you want and what services you’d like us to provide.

Some clients want us to build their website and then they take care of it 100%; other clients want us to do ongoing maintenance and updates. Either way, we will do all we can to offer you a solution that is affordable and tailored to your needs. Contact us to get started.

Check out our web portfolio.

We Love WordPress:

Starting back in the 1990s and up until around 2006, almost all the websites we designed and built were custom designs and hand-coded, always using W3C-compliant valid HTML/XHTML, CSS and PHP code.

Since 2006 we have also built many websites using WordPress (WP), and we’ve become quite the converts! There are many advantages to using a CMS (content management system) such as WP; we believe using a CMS is a very smart strategy —especially if you:

  • Want to create and maintain a large website, or a website that will be having a lot of regular changes/updates, or — and this may be the biggest advantage;
  • If you want to manage your own website but you do not know code!

WordPress, like most CMS tools, has an intuitive and easy-to-use “WYSIWYG” (What You See is What You Get) visual editor, similar to word processing software. And among the numerous CMS options out there, it’s widely accepted that WP is by far the easiest to learn and most accessible to “regular” non-geek folk. It is the #1 CMS worldwide, with nearly 50% of ALL websites worldwide built with WP! (See trends.builtwith.com/cms for CMS usage statistics.)

Read more at To CMS or Not to CMS.

All that said, we are still happy to custom build a website to meet your exact design wishes! A non-CMS-based website may be appropriate if your website will be a more static (i.e. infrequent changes/updates) “brochure website.” Non-CMS websites do have the advantage of being less prone to hacker attack, since they do not have the active scripting of a CMS.

Pricing & Fees:

  • We offer our services on a sliding scale basis:
    • $40-$60/hour for non-profits, seniors and low-income people;
    • $70-$100/hour for commercial enterprises and folks who can afford to pay such fees.
  • Building you a basic WordPress website will typically take around 5-8 hours, and will include the following:
    • Basic setup of the WordPress installation;
    • Up to ten (possibly more) pages with content that you provide;
    • Setting up your “Blog” or “News” section;
    • One or more navigation menus;
    • Uploading whatever images or files (.doc, .pdf, etc.) you provide;
    • Creating one or more contact forms;
    • Possibly some other features as well, depending on what you want and what we agree on as “basic setup.”
  • We love to support worthy causes, and do a significant amount of pro bono work for non-profits and other worthy projects/groups. You’ll see in our web portfolio a significant number of non-profits and civic/political clients. However, we do need to pay the bills like everyone else, so our ability to give away our time is limited. Contact us if you have any questions about this.