About Web Design, Web Design Costs, Process and more
Does my business need a website?
Is Mind-Catching Design a big design agency?
What kind of design services are you offering?
What are the costs involved for having a website?
What's the cost for a "typical" website?
Do you accept credit cards?
What is your web design/ web development process?
Does my business need a website?
As a business owner, especially a small business owner, you may have asked whether your business needs a website considering the cost for having one. Here are some pros and cons of having a website.
Pros:
- A well-developed and designed website will save you time and money. Your website will be always available online even after hours, so you/your staff may not have to answer the phone as frequent because now people have another way of getting the information they need about your business: your website. Even better, you can reduce or even eliminate the cost for printing and distributing hand-outs, brochures, newsletter... All are already available online.
- A well-developed and designed website will help you sell more. The website will make it more convenient for your potential and current customers find the information they need and make their buying decisions. With today's web technology, online shopping comparison and online referral/bookmarking have become the way of life. People usually shop around online before making a purchase. If they find something interesting online they'll add it to their social bookmarking for later review and share it with their online friends - who may very well be your prospects. Without a website, you and your business will miss all of those opportunities.
- With high impact images, colors, typography, and persuasive text content, a website can be a powerful visual aid for your business, or it can be a knowledgeable and convincing and tireless virtual salesperson. This can certainly benefit your business in many ways.
- Your business may appear more professional before your potential customers because you've had a business phone number, a fax number and now a website and an email address from your own domain name - yourname@yourbusiness.com.
- With a website, your business can be listed in an array of online free and paid directories including the mega web directories of Google and Yahoo! and other business-specific online directories.
Cons:
- Your website comes at a price ranging from a couple of hundreds to thousands of dollars depending on how complicated the site will be. See below for more information about the costs of having a website.
- If poorly designed and developed, you site won't be visible at all to search engines. Your website is there online, but people can't find it. Thus, you get only a few leads from the website which may not be enough to compensate for the costs.
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Is Mind-Catching Design a big design agency?
Mind-Catching is not a big design agency. It's created and run by a Freelance Web designer/ Web developer in Austin, TX. It's basically a one-person business; however, Mind-Catching Design has a network of friends/partners who are experienced and professional web/graphic/flash/multimedia designers and readily available to help when needed. We were in San Jose, California before and moved to Austin, TX in 2007. Although based in Austin, we can serve you wherever you are.
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What kind of design services are you offering?
We're offering web design, graphic design, and Flash design and development. Although Flash works can sometimes be incorporated in our web design projects; many times they're stand-alone animations, banner ads, or simple games with use of actionscripting.
If you currently have a website, we can maintain it for you; we can also re-design your website User Interface, re-develop the whole site, add new pages, new graphics, new functions to the site, or make your site more search engine friendly. If you haven't had a webiste; we can work with you from the beginning till the completion of the project and even show you how to make minor update to your site. Contact us for a free quote/consultation.
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What are the costs involved for having a website with Mind-Catching Design?
Generally, in terms of payment frequency, there're two types of costs: one-time cost, and recurring cost.
- One-time cost is mainly for the web design and development, and search engine services. This may include the cost for designing logo, banners, developing flash interactive content, acquiring images. See Question 4 for more.
- Recurring cost - or periodical cost is the cost for [1] maintaining/updating the website; [2] paying for your domain name; [3] and paying for your web hosting company.
If you can update the website yourself, you don't have to pay for [1]. However, we can always help you maintain and update your website. In fact, Mind-Catching Design offers different website maintenance packages such as monthly maintenance, quarterly or yearly maintenance, or by project maintenance. Contact us for more details about your website maintenance needs.
As for [2] and [3] - paying for your domain name and web hosting services, here's the ballpark figure for your reference: a ".com" domain name would cost you about $10-$20/year, and a decent professional web hosting package would cost you about $100-$150/year. If you want an e-commerce website, you would have to pay more for a static IP address and/or other web security related costs. These are the fees charged by the Domain Name and Web Hosting Providers, not by Mind-Catching.
Therefore, you can either pay for [2] and [3] yourself, or you can come to us for managing your domain and hosting services. Just don't forget that if these fees are not duly paid, both your domain name and web hosting services are to be expired, and your website won't be visible anymore.
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What's the cost for a "typical" website?
There's no such thing as a typical website. Every business or individual has their own requirement and their own taste when it comes to web design. Some are not very particular/specific about the design elements while others have their own design guidelines to be followed.
Here's the ball-park again for your reference. If your website is a non-ecommerce site and has about 3-8 pages, the cost would range from $400 - $2,000 or even more. [You still have to pay about $100-$150 every year for your domain and web hosting services]. So why the difference?
It all comes down to how much time we have to spend on your web design project. If your site is simple, and you are very clear about what you want in terms of content and design layout for your site, you'll save us time, thus you'll save yourself money. On the other hand, if you want a more complex website layout, more complex web graphics including montage, banners, icons or Flash elements, and/or also want us to provide search engines follow-up services, you'll have to pay more.
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Do you accept credit cards?
Yes, we do. We accept PayPal and credit cards - processed by PayPal, so your confidential and private information will be securely handled by a trusted company - PayPal - an eBay's company.
» Learn more about our payment methods
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What is your web design/ web development process?
Below is the overall break-down of work for a web design project at Mind-Catching Design. We always keep our clients posted every step of the way and work closely with our clients to make timely adjustments.
- Project Analysis: uncovering and understanding your business, your clients/target audience, and your competitors; establishing the goals/objectives for the web design project; researching keywords/key phrases used for the text content.
- Web Design: creating the wireframe/site architecture of your website; designing the graphic mock-up of your home page and a secondary page if your secondary pages have a different layout from the home page. All is done in light of the previously completed analysis. There's no coding involved so far. The final product after this stage will be an image of your web page which will be identical to the your actual finished website.
- Web Development/ Construction: developing/coding HTML/CSS mock-up from the graphic mock-up previously designed; testing download speeds and browser compatibilities; developing/coding the whole site and developing backend database if needed while optimizing content for search engines; testing everything again including emails, forms, database, and browser compatibilities.
- Launching: Bringing the new website live; submitting the site to major search engines and possibly other online directories; keeping track of and analysing the site traffic to make timely adjustments if necessary. There may be two launching phases depending on how big and complicated your website is: soft launch - bringing everything live but not yet announcing it to the public; hard launch - announcing your newly designed/re-designed website through an email blast, letting your social network know about the site through your blog, adding your new website address to your business cards and other sales/business literatures...
- Maintaining: We provide this service per your request. In addition to making text, graphic or other technical update for the website, we also give you a periodical performance report which summarizes your site ranking in major search engines, your keywords, key terms performance, your website traffic and visitor information... From this report, we can make additional adjustments so as to further improve your ranking in major search engines.
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