Frequently Asked Questions

There are four different areas you will need to consider.

1. You will need your own domain name for your website, like www.yourcompany.com. There is an ongoing yearly fee to keep your domain name registered.
2. You will need a web hosting company to serve your website pages. There is an ongoing monthly, quarterly or yearly fee for this service.
3. You will need a website design company to develop your custom website. The fee for this service can vary greatly depending upon your needs and features required for your website. The ultimate cost of the website will depend upon the number of pages, if you are going to be selling products or services, the graphics required and how interactive the website will be. After the website has been developed you will need to maintain and update the site, which can be done by your company or by your website design company.
4. Advertising and promotion are the next area where you will have ongoing expenses. Submitting to some search engines are free others require that you pay a submission fee which is usually good for a year.

Yes, we have a discounted rate for not for profit organizations.

There are many variables that determine how long it takes to complete a website project. Depending upon the size and complexity of the website, it can take from 2 weeks to years. Most projects take one to two months. We find that one of the main delays is due to the customer not providing the information needed in a timely manner, as they are very busy running their business.

The size of your website can vary from one to thousands of pages. It depends upon your needs, how many pages will be needed for your site.

How long does it take to design and implement a website?}That depends upon the size and complexity of the features required. Most websites take between 2 weeks to 4 months to complete.

No one knows your company and needs better than you, so you will be very involved with every aspect of how your website looks, its feel, navigation, content, etc. Your input is key to the success of the website.

You might want to make notes about what you like, regarding

• content layout & navigation
• colour palette
• text formatting: fonts & headings
• images: photos, icons, buttons, etc.
• graphical styles & effects, overall feel

Don't forget to save the URL or name of the templates you make notes on.

No, your website will look different on different computer monitors that have different display resolutions. Also, different browsers and browser versions display pages similarly, but not exactly the same.

For better or worse, most small business owners write their own copy. If you want to publish professional marketing copy on your Website, you should consider retaining a copy writer.

Yes, the website will be implemented in such a way that you will be easily able to do your own updates and additional pages. Almost all websites we build have a Content Management System (CMS), which allows authorized users to log in and update general content (text and images) on the Website at any time.

Periodic maintenance of CMS websites are necessary to keep them updated with the most current software and security release. For this type of maintenance you will need to have a professional web developer that is familiar with the CMS do the updates.

You should anticipate that there is a learning curve involved with this. Budget initially 2-4 hours’s training, depending on your team members’ skill and experience. You will probably find that your team will need some additional training after using the system, for more advanced features.

For significant updates, such as changes to the parts of the website design that are common to all pages (the template or “shell”), you will generally need to come to us.

Yes, there can be more than one level of administrator set up in your site’s control panel. Each person that will be doing updates will be setup with their own account with the appropriate privileges, for the type of updates they will be doing.

Keashly.ca Consulting has maintenance plans. You can buy a discounted prepaid block of time to be used towards maintenance and security updates or pay as go. Find out more about our Maintenance plans.

You are the owner of your website. The person(s) that you designate will be the technical and administrative contacts for your site. This information will be used when your domain name is registered.

Our role is to make your Website as search-engine-friendly as possible. To this end, we use techniques such as text navigation and source-ordered CSS-based layouts. We will always try to help you make sure that you are using your search terms wisely in your Website’s code.

For professional Search Engine Marketing, you should always hire a specialist.

Once the website has gotten final approval from you, we will submit it to search engines. This will start generating traffic to your website within 4 - 6 weeks. Other ways to promote your website is to put your domain name on all business cards, promotional materials, advertising, etc. and tell people about your new website. Have promotions that entice customers to visit your website.

Most web hosting companies will provide you with site statistics. All web hosting companies that we recommend have a statistics package included just so you can review this information on an ongoing basis.

We can evaluate your current website and see where improvements are required. It may just be that you need to make minor updates and promote your website with search engines or a totally new design may be called for.

We generally work with common open-source technologies such as PHP, MySQL, and Joomla! CMS (aka the “LAMP stack”). For this reason, you will have less of a problem finding other developers that can work with the site that we build you. If your project requires technologies that we don’t support, we will let you know.