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So You Need A Website...

How do you go about it and what do you need to do? The time has come when a fully functioning website is a basic cost of being in business as well as a way to increase your business.

The steps:

• Pick a reasonable name for your website. It must be simple and direct, not an easy task now since every simple domain name in the world has already been taken. You can't use hyphens, or dot something else besides dot com if you want make it easy to be found a second time by your customers. Lady Slipper Webs will help you with this, unless you have already purchaed a domain name.
• Register the domain name, which means buying it, or rather renting it from a domain name registrar. The cheapest registrars charge about $10 per year. By the way, if you stop paying for it, you lose it. Most abandoned domain names are snapped up and hijacked by "squatters" who try to make you pay a bundle of money if you have to have it back. For this reason, we put our email address on your account as the contact email, so we can nag you to pay your bill!
• You pay for hosting of your website. This is separate from purchasing the domain name. You have to have your website files on a server so your customers can find it. Web hosting can be less than $100 per year with cheaper webhosts.
• Once hosting has been paid for, email comes with it, and Lady Slipper Webs sets up your email for you and helps you configure it so you can receive it on your computer.
• You provide Lady Slipper Webs with the web pages you want to have, such as Home Page, About Us, Our Products, Contact Us, etc.
• For the design, many options exist. We can do a very simple website for you, you can show us a website you would like to emulate, or we can provide a graphics artist to do a design for an additional fee. Or perhaps you have a marketing company you use regularly who can provide a website design.
• You provide us with the content, or text, you want on each page. Some people think Lady Slipper Webs can magically create a website when they give us the go-ahead, but we are not experts in your business.
• Lady Slipper Webs creates your website, consulting with you along the way by phone or meetings.
• We can make your website easy for you to keep updated, perhaps you want to post specials on a Specials page, we can make that easy to do, or we can keep your website updated for you. Some of our clients prefer this, and we usually can meet your request within 24 hours, often sooner.
• We design your site with search engine optimization in mind, making it easy for search engines to find your site and see that it is a valid site.
• Voila, your beautiful website is up and running for all your customers to admire!
• But it doesn't end there. We can help you market your business on the Internet. Websites are not instantly found by search engines without a little help.
• If you want a new design on your site at a later time, we design sites so it is a simple task to change the design without changing anything else.
• We set you up with Google Analytics so you can follow your web statistics. You can see which pages are viewed the most, what countries, states and cities your hits come from, what sites your hits come from (search engines, other websites, etc) and how many daily hits you get in any specified period of time (one day, one month, one year, etc).