Introduction: Web design services:
Just how can a professionally designed website help your business?
> You cannot create the dynamic effects of a website with traditional print material.
> Print material cannot take orders 24/7.
> You can now market to the entire world, instead of your localized area.
> It offers minimal cost in changing content, as opposed to reprinting a brochure.
> If you don't have a website, you're losing business.
If you already have promotional material, such as a company brochure, that will help us in getting your site up and running quickly, we can use the material you have as a guidepost to creating a site that will flow and complement your current marketing materials.
If you do not have any material, we can start from scratch and help you create an online identity that can give your company an international image and level the playing field between you and your competitors, who are already using the web.
It seems that everyone knows someone who can design a website. We'd be dishonest if we didn't acknowledge that anyone who is fairly computer literate can write some text and paste some clip art onto a page and call it a website. But the problem with that approach is just how professional will that site look, and will it perform in the search engines?
By using a professional website design company, you can avoid having a site that has poor marketing or presentation appeal and can reflect badly upon your business. All our sites are designed to be accessible by spiders used by all the major search engines, so that with the proper optimization, your site can be found for its given niche.
A good portion of our business comes from referrals from customers who love the site we designed for them, and they are more than happy to pass our name on to an associate or acquaintance who is in the market for a custom designed website, but not at outrageous prices.
National and local search engine optimization:
A vital part of having a website is driving traffic to that site. There are many ways to do this, but one of the most effective methods is to make sure your website shows up in the major search engines. If you're a brick and mortar business that only sells to local area residents, then it's a must for you to show up when people type in your product or service for that area. If you sell nationally, then it's just as important to have your site show up when somebody types in the product or service your business is offering.
There are many snake oil salesmen offering optimization, where they submit to all the major search engines. The truth is, you don't have to submit to any of them when the optimization is done correctly since the search engine robots will spider your site anyway.
According to Google guidelines, anybody who offers you a guarantee should be dealt with using caution since nobody but Google, Bing or Yahoo can guarantee you anything. Algorithms change, and with it, the rankings can change too. Here is a great link to Google's guidelines about using optimizers that many of the snake oil guys don't want you to know about (Google SEO guidelines).
We use only White Hat techniques and have delivered proven results for many different clients. Once you contact us, we will provide you both local and national sites that we have optimized for you, so you can see for yourself the type of results we get our clients.
E-commerce:
If you're going to be selling products online, the most effective method of doing this is to use a shopping cart with a payment processor and gateway to process the credit card orders.
Developing a shopping cart from scratch can be a costly project. While we will do that for a client if they must have it, we recommend using an open source cart called zen cart. It is well-supported and can be modified to fit your website's look. Here is a sample cart setup with no customization (zen sample). It has all of the features most companies need to run an effective online shopping program and the best thing about it is, the cart itself is free. The cost comes in modifying it for your application.
Over the years, we have seen that many new start-up businesses don't have the budget to create a great-looking custom website and then also pay to have a shopping cart created and skinned to their new site. This can become expensive because of the time and programming involved in creating a custom cart from scratch.
For this reason, we offer an e-commerce solution, where we use zen cart as the base shopping cart. We, then, design your site and wrap the cart into the site layout. For a flat fee of $1,650.00, you can be up and running in no time.
(* Note: you will need hosting, merchant account with gateway and a secure cert for your site, which is additional and billed directly to you.)
Mobile websites:
With smartphone usage increasing everyday, more people are using their phones to surf the web and look at sites. A regular website is not designed to look good in a small screen, and many times, the sites are very hard to see. You can, however, present your visitors who arrive on your site via cell phone, with a mobile phone version of the site that looks good, gets your message across and provides them a way to contact you.
We design a version of the site using your current site colors and look and lay it out to look good in a small cellphone screen. You won't get all the fancy graphics or animation, but you will get a good-looking mobile version of your site that allows you to access the user base of the millions of people who use their cellphones for everything.
We place a small file on your site that will detect when a person is visiting your site using a cellphone browser. Once detected, they are then shown the mobile phone version of your site.
As cellphone usage increases, this is an important detail you need to think about, since you want to try and capture every bit of traffic to your site, and get them to take action and buy your product or service. There's no better way of doing that than providing them an easy-to-read and easy-to-navigate website.
IPhone app development:
Most people don't know that there are actually two kinds of iPhone apps. The first is the standard app that you submit to Apple for approval, then they list it in their store, and you can either sell it or give it away. These apps must first be approved by Apple, and there is no guarantee that it will get approved. If it's a good app and is not some silly app that has absolutely no value, it should get approved. They have really cracked down on submissions and won't accept a lot of the novelty joke apps anymore.
The second type of app is called a web app. Instead of submitting it to Apple for approval, you can place the app on your own website and either sell or give it away. These types of apps are great for giving to your customers and having them do something useful, so they remember you the next time they need your service.
There is a huge price difference between the two, with web apps being the least expensive to make. This is because the programming that goes into making web apps is not as time consuming and does not use the same programming language as the standard apps.
Standard apps can cost well over $50,000 for a very complex app that requires hundreds of hours of programming time, as opposed to a web app which can be done for as little as $1,500.00 and take a few weeks, at most.
The cost of the app, whether standard or web, is determined by the scope of the app, so give us a call, and we'll see if we can help you develop your next iPhone app.
Graphic design:
Do you need a CD or DVD disc designed, case art or even flyers or brochures? At IWS, we are a one-stop design house and can design the art for your next printed project. We have years of experience using programs like In-Design and Illustrator, which allow us to produce top-quality camera print-ready art work for you to use with a regular printer or even the numerous online budget print sites.
Be sure to check out our portfolio for some of the different types of graphic design projects we have done.
Miscellaneous services:
Here is a list of other services that we also perform:
> PHP database programming
> PHP custom scripting
> Wordpress blog install and customization
> CGI programming and installation
> Shopping carts for e-commerce sites
> Ability to securely accept credit cards over the internet
> JavaScripting
> Flash programming
> Server co-location and administration
> Custom buttons, photos, etc.
> Webmaster and site maintenance duties
> Digital photography
> Video editing and encoding
> Multimedia presentations (using Flash technology)
