The $599 Northern Michigan Web Design Website Design Package
Most web designers give you two choices: Hire them solely to design your site, or hire them to design your site…then hire them again to “optimize” your website…and hire them still a third time to register your domain name (web site address) and “host” the website.

Much of this is jargon to those wanting a website but unsure of how to accomplish the task. I won’t bore you with details but also feel it’s an injustice not to give you a summary of the four phases occurring when launching your website:

The website artistic design phase
Most are familiar with this phase. You hire someone with the software necessary to create your actual web pages. Your designer (if competent) helps you determine which information is critical – and which is repetitive or holds no value. He or she will also coach you through the selection of graphics, including education on staying out of trouble by using only images which you are entitled to use (avoiding copyright infringement, etc.).

Registering your website domain name
Your domain name choice (EG: www.my-website.com) is critical to the search engine optimization phase of your website’s formula (discussed below). For this reason, it should take place before your website is designed. Many designers and search engine optimizers overlook your website’s name. That is, quite frankly, a mistake of paramount proportions. Here’s an example: The “Acme” company sells athletic shoes. Rather than registering the name “www.acme.com” they are much better served with the domain name “www.athletic-shoes.com”. Search engines have no idea what the phrase “Acme.com” represents, but they do understand the term “athletic-shoes.com” is related to athletic shoes.

Once you’ve decided on a domain name for your website, it has to be registered (or “purchased”) - then renewed each year. My competitors purchase domain names for clients in the same way I do. The difference is that some mark-up costs by as much as 500%. That’s no profit margin - that’s unbridled greed. Your $599 Northern Michigan Web Design website package includes your domain name registration purchase for the first year. Yep – I’ll hit you up for your renewal in 12 months, but not marked-up by 500%. It’s simply my cost plus the labor involved.

Optimizing your website through search engine optimization
A website, for the most part, is totally useless unless it can be found by those using search engines like Google or Yahoo – bringing brand new business through the brick-and-mortar doorway of your business. Sure, you can have a website which potential customers visit because it’s printed on your business card, but those customers have already touched-base with you. You’ve already made contact. After that initial contact it’s up to you to sell them on their need for your product or service and “close the deal”.

Search engine optimization is the art – and I do mean art – of convincing the search engines that your site is more relevant to the subject at hand than your competitors. And when it comes to search engines, your competitors can be in the tens-of-thousands or even millions. It’s fact that the average internet user searching Google or Yahoo only considers the first few pages of search returns. In those first pages they either find what they’re looking for or give-up all together. Search engine optimization is the process of assembling your website to help ensure the chances that it falls within those first few pages of results.

Search engine optimization is cloaked in a shroud of mystery. Few designers understand what is involved – even fewer are successful at optimizing. There are no guarantees when securing your place within the first few coveted pages in search engine results. Let me emphasize this: Any optimizer who guarantees your placement is either ignorant or an outright liar. The system just doesn’t work that way. Legitimate optimizers will only tell you that they maximize the chance of success.

There are no black and white rules which guarantee success. Optimizing is much like a cooking recipe – either it works or it doesn’t. The ingredients are up to the chef (the optimizer), but the results are judged by those tasting the dish (the search engines). So far I’ve been blessed with a recipe sure to please the palettes of Google and Yahoo.

Once your website hosting
is secured it's time to
sit-back and relax.

Hosting your website
OK, your website is ready to go. The design is complete. You have your domain name registered. Optimization is a done-deal. Now what?

The final step is “uploading” the files created by your designer to a server on the internet. The server acts as a “host” to you – keeping your precious files safe and sound – and available for internet users to view when they type your domain name. This relationship is why the process is most often referred to as “hosting your website”. Without hosting no one (besides yourself) will ever view your website.

Much like registering (or purchasing) your domain name, my competitors offer hosting services – but at criminally marked-up prices. Monthly rates of $40 or $50 are commonplace. Hire Northern Michigan Web Design to host your website and you can kiss those monthly fees goodbye. Those fees are included in the $599 price tag for a period of 12 months. Again, I’ll hit you up after the 12 months, but at a cost-effective annual fee – which is dirt cheap compared to others.

Click the following link to contact Northern Michigan Web Design and begin the website launch process.