The process is a long one and, with some search engines and directories,
extremely slow. It involves research and a lot of hours just to do the manual
listings, as well as ongoing tweaking, refining and additions. In some cases you
will see almost immediate results, but in others it can take months. Google is a
good case in point, where changes can take up to 6 months to register. It has
even been known to take longer in some cases.
This is particularly true on new websites.
The 6 month contract is in fact the shortest feasible contract to ensure that
you get the results and that we have a chance to do the job properly.
The other side to this is that there are certain aspects to internet marketing
that are ongoing. The 12 month contract gives you a solid boost in terms of those
elements, for example, the acquisition of quality links.
Very seldom, if ever. We always work from the premise of "why pay if you
don't have to?" and this applies very much to ppc, which is not only expensive
(don't believe the claims to the contrary) but most times really not necessary.
If your site is properly optimised and marketed you should be able to draw good
generic (natural) traffic.
If you are in a highly competitive market and your site is too small or too new
to do well as quickly as you would like it to and you are happy to accept the
cons, then by all means we will assist you in identifying the best ppc
programmes and managing them. If you are looking at ppc, please chat to us first
and let us help you to assess if this is the best option for you before you
spend your hard-earned cash..
here are many myths about search engines and directories, created and spread
by individuals and companies who are preying on those who don't know better.
This question relates to one such myth.
There are only a handful of search engines and directories - 10 max - that have
any value at all. Most legitimate small directories draw off these and do not
need to be submitted to. Many smaller search engines and directories are no more
than link farms - something that can hurt you with the serious search engines.
Many others are simply small one-man bands that are barely used by anyone.
As for resubmitting, there is no need. Once a search engine has found you, it
has found you and will keep coming back. More important, resubmission can annoy
the important search engines and directories and get your site removed
altogether.
We submit to very few search engines and directories and, with the remainder of
the important ones, use different methods to get your site indexed.
Finally, just in case someone is wondering, we also do not do any automated
submissions. Once again these target fairly useless engines and upset the
important ones.
No you don’t, but if we have to choose between potential clients who do and
potential clients who don't, we would opt for those who do. The reason for this
is because we know exactly what we can do with our hosting and we have extensive
statistical software on our servers. This allows us to properly monitor our
results to ensure we meet the agreed objectives for your site. If you would
rather remain with your current hosting company, we respect your loyalty towards
them, but would not be able to accept you as a marketing client unless we at
least had full access to your site, your current host provides good stats that
are updated daily and which we can access at will and nobody else works on the
site for the duration of the contract.
There is also another scenario. At times we are approached by clients who in
fact have no idea how the site is currently performing. In a situation like that
we would recommend hosting with us for 3 months before embarking on any
marketing programme. By monitoring and assessing the site for the client in this
period we may find that the expense of a marketing programme is in fact not
needed or at least not the best first option. Sometimes it can be something
quite unexpected and relatively easy to resolve that has been causing a site not
to perform up to scratch.
Why spend money if you don't have to?
Some of the more important considerations are:
Uptime is critical. They should guarantee at least 99% and the guarantee
should not just be words. - Do they offer a money-back guarantee?
However - a word of caution: be careful of any guarantee of 100% uptime. This
indicates that the host is either being deceptive or is not maintaining their
servers properly and not doing essential upgrades. This places your site at risk
because security and stability will become compromised, eventually leading to
all sorts of potential problems (all placing your site at risk) and even a
complete server crash.
Bandwidth is critical. - Do they have sufficient bandwidth to cope with
the load? How many websites do they put on each physical server? A good host
would ensure that there is always enough free server space and capacity.
Check that they offer enough space for your site and for reasonable
future growth. For a small business site, this should be at least 5-10MB
(megabytes). A 10 MB allowance on an average small site should offer sufficient
room for quite a bit of future growth.
Check that they allow enough traffic. This is measured in megs or gigs. 1
gig is roughly equal to 100 000 hits. Each time someone visits your site, every
image or script on a page is a hit. For a small business website 500MB is
normally more than sufficient unless the site is offering software downloads,
streaming, chat rooms, forums, large flash objects or other forms of
interactivity that use up a lot of bandwidth.
If you want to use any scripts, check that your hosting company allows
the specific script and that there is no additional charge attached. This
includes any forms, auto responders, flash or special effects that you want to
use on your site.
Email: you must get at least one email address linked to your website,
that you can check through either your normal email programme (like Outlook
Express) or on the web itself from anywhere in the world. One of the biggest
advantages to having this facility (apart from looking professional) is that
your email address belongs entirely to you for as long as you own the domain
name. - This means that you can change hosts and connectivity providers in the
future without any fear of losing your email address.
Support: can you contact them and get free basic support - including
after hours? Are they available in an emergency? Do they actually give you quick
and meaningful answers and/or solutions ? Do they bend over backwards to help
you ?
Upgrades: can you upgrade your hosting package later without hassle or
huge cost? You may not be thinking of changing your site right now, but who
knows what you may decide in another month or 6 months time. Your hosting
provider should offer packages that are flexible enough to accommodate this
without disrupting your website or breaking the bank.
Hosting set-up: will they help you with getting set up (including email)
and sorting out any difficulties you may have or are you just a number and a
cheque at the end of the month? Find out the full extent of this support. It may
be limited to the pure hosting side.
Statistics: do they supply statistics that are comprehensive enough for
you to clearly track what is and is not working on your site? You cannot
possibly know if your site is an effective marketing tool unless you can monitor
the results. You need to know how many visitors you are getting and where they
are coming from, what they are doing on your site and how much business your
site is generating. - Stats help you to more accurately assess and improve on
your investment.
Backups: do they do regular backups so that if their server does go down
they can reload everything again immediately? - Please note that it is still
your responsibility (personally or via your webmaster) to ensure that you have a
full backup of your current site, but your host should at least be able to get a
fairly recent version of your site back up and running if there is a server
problem.
Every time someone visits your site or sends an email to or from your
website; every time you upload or download anything on your site, this is
traffic. Any reliable hosting company will give you a traffic limit because this
is how they ensure that their server does not get overloaded. - An overload will
slow down your site’s loading and can even cause a complete server crash.
Hosting companies who offer unlimited traffic (bandwidth) are not being honest
and should be approached with caution. Similarly, hosts that allow extremely
high bandwidth at a low cost should also be eyed with caution because they are
overselling. In other words, they are taking a gamble that you will not use what
they are giving you anyway, so they inflate their packages to look more
impressive. - This is like paying for a gallon of milk when you'll only drink a
glass full.
While there is a good chance that you won't use everything in your package, the
next 3 or 4 guys might and this will affect your site as well because they are
on the same server.
Yes. Our hosting runs on 12 month basis because we are sure that you
will be happy enough with us to want to stay.
However, from time to time we do offer special packages and these may be
conditional on a contract, purely to ensure that the specials don't get abused.
You will however never be tied to a contract with us without it being your
conscious decision to do so.
A hosting company and an internet service provider are essentially two
different things. A service provider is the company that gives you access to the
internet. A hosting company gives the rest of the world permanent access to your
website.
Some service providers do also offer website hosting, but these are essentially
two separate services altogether.
There are advantages and disadvantages to both options: doing your hosting
with your service provider or keeping it seperate. One consideration is
obviously the cost. If the hosting is a free service, this will save you monthly
hosting fees.
A downside is that you have all your eggs in one basket and can end up trapped,
where the two services are so interconnected that you dare not change either
later without it hurting your business.
A further possible downside is the bandwidth. This is how busy their server
(main computer) is with all the activity going on.
A hosting company that does nothing but host is less busy than one that offers
connectivity and hosting. - It is like the difference between having a
freeway with just fast cars on it vs one that is loaded with large trucks as
well. This can effect reliability and speed.
Absolutely. You can in fact use a hosting company anywhere in the world and
many people use hosting companies that are in a different country. As long as
you have access to your host in case you have a problem, it is better to select
the best hosting company rather than the closest.
Although we are in Guwahati, we provide hosting for various clients throughout
India and internationally.
Yes you can, by various means. If you have a basic knowledge of html and have
an FTP programme, OR have a basic knowledge of MS Frontpage, OR just want to
manage minor changes and are comfortable in MSWord (which our WYSIWYG site
editing software emulates), OR you ask us to add a more advanced editor to your
site.
We offer a hosting package that includes a wysiwyg editor which is very
intuitive and will allow you to manage your website without any html or
Frontpage knowledge at all.
For a nominal additional fee we can also add on our advanced editor, which is
quicker and easier to use, can allow different people permission to edit
different pages and site content and cannot break your site.
However, please note that if you opt for any form of self-management, this is
entirely at your own risk. Please be sure to have a back-up of your site before
you begin making any changes, in case something goes wrong. Although we do
regular backups, this is in case of a server emergency and is not intended to be
used to back up individual sites that have been accidentally wiped or corrupted.
This only applies to self-managed hosting options. If we are your webmaster (we
manage your site for you) then we obviously do have up to date back-ups of your
site.
You do not need a computer to be on the internet. It is the same as taking an
advert in a newspaper that you never read. The advert is aimed at reaching your
target market. A website is the same. It is not for your benefit, but for the
express purpose of reaching that segment of your market who do have and use
their computers to find things on the internet.
You would merely provide no email contact, but still give all other contact
details. The number of people who are using the internet as a preferred resource
is growing by the day and this is a sector of the market that you stand to lose
if you do not have a website.
The common name for this is a "template site" and there is nothing wrong with
it if you are happy to have a site that is a standard with no real persona of
its own and you don't mind if your site looks like various other sites on the
internet.
Many people however prefer to have a unique site which encapsulates their
essence and it just so happens that we pride ourselves on creating them. Many
standard template sites however have nothing wrong with them.
Please do just consider that a website on its own is not enough. Even if you do
decide to go for a template, which is generally much cheaper, it is worth paying
a bit extra to ensure that they do at least customise it for you from an
optimisation point of view.
With most businesses it does not matter because you as the client are
providing the content for the site. A competent web developer would also know
how to source material related to your site and get a feel for your business. It
is better to have a good web developer rather than someone who shares your
knowledge of your industry, but who may not give you the best website.
If however you are in a highly specialised field and want the web developer to
do the bulk of the copy writing as well, then someone with knowledge of your
business is obviously important. - Just remember what you are paying them for:
to do what they do best so that you can do what you do best.
If you are not sure if we have an understanding of your particular business,
please drop us an email or give us a call
Afraid not. Website development is different to hardcopy advertising, where
the norm is that you start with a draft. Any draft that we could do would
certainly not be one that would give you a realistic idea of what the end
product would look like or how it would function. The internet is a very dynamic
medium and the whole is a lot more than the sum of its parts. Each of our web
sites are custom made. They are unique and created from scratch, so that by the
time an effective draft had been created, you would in fact already have the end
result.
Our past projects section should give you a good idea of whether or not you
think we can meet your needs. - Please also read the next question and answer.
We have never had this experience. However, once the site is complete, we
post it on the internet for your approval. From that time you have 7 calender
days in which to give us feedback and we will tweak and change until you are
happy. We are so confident that we can make this commitment: If you had to
dislike the entire site, we would do a complete custom redesign at no extra
cost. Provided that we have followed your design specifications, this is limited
to one redesign. If the site is still not satisfactory because you changed your
mind about what you want, the second redesign would bear an additional cost to
you.
It is however highly unlikely that this would ever happen. One of our major
strengths is the ability to create a website to suit and project the character
and image of each individual business.
We know that there are companies charging as much as $200 US per page. We
believe this is excessive for our market.
Our primary focus is small to medium sized businesses and we deliberately keep
our overheads and fees low so that our services are affordable. We see no need
to charge the earth.
It actually isn’t. We charge way below the norm at this stage and, in
addition, we are not just doing pure optimisation, but also comprehensive
internet marketing.
Be sure to compare apples with apples. In addition to the fact that our package
entails comprehensive marketing, we also have a defined contract period. Some
companies offer a lower monthly rate, but the term is indefinite and works out
much more expensive in the end. One of the biggest problems with this second
type of company is that all they do is optimise one page and that page never
belongs to you. - If you ever cancel the contract, you may no longer use the
page that they created. With us, you have paid for the service and the site, as
well as all our efforts, is therefore yours.
Finally, we are doing it the proper way and that takes a lot of time and input.
All amounts owing are invoiced electronically and emailed to clients. We also generate paper invoices or post invoices by snail mail.
All amounts owing are payable in full on receipt of invoice.
Domain registration and/or transfer fees are payable immediately that they are
ordered.
A deposit of 40-50% is payable before commencement of any design or development
work.
All other one-off amounts (like the balance due on site development) are
invoiced and payable immediately upon completion.
We are reasonable and understand that things sometimes go wrong. We will not
simply suspend or terminate an account for non-payment, provided that you
contact us before due date if you have a problem. The only time that we will
suspend or terminate is if we feel that you are not doing anything to sort out
the problem; if we feel that our willingness to assist a client is being abused;
if the problem is continuing for an excessive period with no sign of resolution;
if the problem occurs frequently.
An account can and most likely will be terminated with no further warning if the
next months account becomes overdue while the site is already suspended for
non-payment.
Please note that no new service will be activated until payment has been
received in full. This includes the commencement of work on a website, the final
uploading or release of a website, domain registration and domain transfers.
Not at all. Our costs are all declared upfront and, if you happen to catch us
on a hectic day and we forgot to declare any cost, we take the loss.
Why are others more expensive? - At the end of the day web designers/developers
will charge what people are prepared to pay. We believe that many are grossly
overcharging, but that is our opinion. Our aim is to maintain fees at an
affordable but realistic level, without becoming cheap and being forced to
produce substandard and uninspired work and service as a result.
We are currently looking for a part-time tele-sales person. Ideally someone
who can operate efficiently in an informal environment and who is self-motivated
with good people skills.
We really don't like people who are annoying or arrogant and have no desire to
subject potential clients to them either, so assertiveness without being
objectionable is a key characteristic.
Should ideally have experience in selling intangibles.
The position is for mornings only, working 2 hours a day and offers a small
basic plus sliding scale commission. Please contact us via email only if you
feel this could be a match.
We do also from time to time hire people on a per-project or short term contract
basis to assist with various admin and overflow functions. If you are
interested, please drop us a line and
feel free to inspire us to want to work with you.