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eZ's WebSite Services |
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A website contains your information and your online tools. You know the information; you manage it; you control it; you know how to use the tools of your business. We believe you need to have as much control and "say-so" as possible.
We prefer to enable you to do most of your website management. We can help you analyze your requirements to understand them better. We can help you understand your competitors' websites and how you can serve your customer needs best.
You are responsible for verifying that we understand your requirements, your changing needs, and your preferences.
We can get you online. We will help you decide what you need to do to keep your website up, running, and current.
If you provide "raw" content, we can format it and edit it for the web. If you have information that it is difficult to format, we can help you.
We'll help you figure out how to make your website work for your customers. We will build the relationship with you make all the roles work for you, for us, and for your customers.
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Website Pre-Planning |
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Before you start planning your website, think it through. It will make your work with us in planning your website much easier. These are some of the core issues to start.
- Mission. Do you want a website because everyone else has one and, maybe, you need one too? Better yet, how will a website affect your core business?
- Expectations. Have you thought through what a website will do for your customers and why it might be important to them? Have you thought through what an internal website will do for your employees as they share information and access internal programs?
- Content. What information do you really need to make available on a website? How does that help you?
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Website Redesign |
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Redesigning a website introduces some new factors. These include
- Reusing the existing content. Often this requires extensive editing and updating information. Often the formatting of old websites makes it difficult to salvage information, and it is easier to start over.
- Losing position in the search engines. Google and Yahoo retain their knowledge of a website's structure long after a site is revised. This leads to 404 errors--page not found errors. To prevent these errors the references to old web page need to be redirected to the proper location in the new website.
- Maintaining parallel systems during development and testing stages. Sometimes it is practical to create a new site only on a local computer that has its own server. In other cases, the new site must be online during development and testing. This can require a throwaway domain name or a subweb until the new site replaces the old site.
- Changing website host or domain registrars. New accounts may be required by the new site because of host limitations, security breaches, site capacity, performance, cost, and other factors.
- New requirements / abilities / technologies. Today's complex websites would have been impossible or prohibitively expenses a few years ago. It may be relatively inexpensive to meet new requirements.
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Cost Estimates |
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Unless your requirements are crystal clear, you probably should not expect a firm, fixed cost estimate for a complete turnkey job. We recommend that you start with a general estimate of the total project cost realizing that "realistic" estimates are often less than 50% of the final cost. It is the nature of the business. Cost estimates will change; they always do. Below are some recommendations for keeping things under control and understandable.
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