Our Business Package is suited for more advanced situations, including
- Businesses. You may want to consider eCommerce or a shopping cart. If you're into providing services, we can connect you with specialized tools for managing and tracking services. We also can provide detailed marketing tools via Google and Facebook.
- Non-Profit. You may be interested in a services, members, and partner organizations directory. You may even want to manage reservations and tickets for events.
- Government. We can install document management tools for official minutes of meetings, policies, etc. We can also establish a site where multiple offices each have their private area to manage content.
Our estimated price of $3,000 is a reasonable starting price for a small business, but your actual price may vary as you customize our mix of options for your needs.
This medium-duty website is still agile and easy to maintain--there's more to it. It still runs in Joomla, but we've added more extensions that more powerful business sites require. And we beefed up the performance--you won't outgrow it. Your particular business site will have a unique combination of features.
Naming Your Website
A good business needs a name that is compatible with its official name. Sometimes, those names, or similar names, are taken. We'll help you choose one (or more) name to give you good recognition on the Internet while protecting you from similar names established by the competition or other businesses that could be unrelated but distracting to people looking for your business.
- Purchase. Find and purchase domain names for two years. We will attempt to tie up alternative domain names to reduce the odds of competitors gaining similar names. While at it, we'll lock down the privacy settings for greater security.
- Link to Website. Activate and point the domain name to a web hosting account.
Email Addresses
Businesses need email addresses that are based on the name of their website.
- Accounts. Create up to 20 email accounts that use your domain name. Additional email accounts are $5 each.
- Spam Control. Activate Spam Assassin on your email host.
- Reader Set-up. Set up your email in your web browser or email client, depending on how many computers you use for your email.
Hosting Details
You need a reputable company to host your website on servers at a secure, high-performance data center.
- Account Setup. The least expensive option is shared hosting, which allows many websites to operate from the same server address. Usually, there are options and pricing to accommodate several levels of service. Complex sites with significant traffic cost more, but they own their specific server address and do not share space (or performance) with other websites. Your hosting might cost as little as $100 per year to several hundred.
- Content Management System. Install Joomla, arguably the best content management system available for full-featured websites. We'll add these essential extensions:
- User-Friendly Editor. Configure our website editor for your use. (If you can use a word processor, use our editor.)
- Tools for Photo Upload. Install media managers to upload photographs and other images.
- Specialized Extensions. We'll load specialized extensions that bring real power to your website. We'll help you choose the best free and commercial extensions to meet your business needs. These extensions could include
- Event Calendar.
- Blogging tools
- Poll and survey tools
- Directories / Catalogs
- Shopping cart
- Appointments booking
- Real Estate
- Backup Tools
Designing and Building
Most business websites need some specialized functions. Usually, that requires time for research and testing of several alternative extensions for Joomla. Some of those extensions may be "free," while good ones typically cost $50 - $300 for a subscription of a few months. For budgeting purposes, figure on 3 - 6 hours of research at $50/hr.
- Templates. We'll help you choose and modify a high-quality commercial template for your website if needed.
- Article Organization. Define unlimited content categories for articles (stories) linking to menus.
- Email Contact Organization. Configure an unlimited number of email contact categories.
- Main Menu Structure. Configure a complete Main Menu and additional other menus as needed.
- Management Menu. Configuration of a private User Menu for website content development, photo uploading, etc. Additional specialized menus are available for $10 and $10 per menu option.
- Visitor Monitoring. Installed Google Analytics to monitor visitors and website errors. We can embed the analytics tools directly into the private part of your website.
- Search Engine Tools—creating a sitemap for Google and other search engines.
- Dummy Content. Draft web pages for menu options with dummy text content and photographs. Dummy content allows you to visualize how your web pages will look.
- Logo. Text logo and slogan for all pages. Graphical logos require additional charges depending on the fees of our professional graphics artist.
- Page Footer. Custom footer for all pages with copyright notices and custom messages.
We'll train you and your staff to use all parts of the website. While we will gladly help you add and edit your website's content, we'd prefer that you be able to add your articles and make changes to them.