Web Design

SisCon offers, a unique range of small business answers to web problems.

Design Evaluation
Web Site Design
Site Updates
Traffic Analysis
Help with Internet Languages


Design Evaluation: For some reason, people have this mentality that every time the usefulness of a web site is in question, you should take it off the net and put something else up. Don't write new code! Rewrite and revise what you have. We have no problem going through a design and laying out problems users will have. Sometimes these flaws are architecture problems; sometimes labeling problems; sometimes technology problems like using frames or Flash. It's ok to say problems are there. Really. It takes a few times to get something right. Point them out and then fix them. Pricing ranges between $200-$500 to analyze a site and do a written walk through. If you would like changes made, it too can be arranged.

These are the main areas we focus on:
· Download Optimization
· Usability Concerns
· Navigation and Architecture
· Best Practices
· Cool and Original Look

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Web Site Design: We take clients all the way from buying their domain name, hosting it, and creating their site. Prices vary by scope of the project. Below is a list of the standard types of sites we produce. An example starting price for making an interface/architecture is roughly $500 and increases as complexities are revealed. Credit card interfaces, shopping carts, and member only areas are available as well. These are considered small business sites:

· Web Magazines
· Portals
· Band Sites
· Record Labels
· Club Sites
· Web Cam Features
· Small Business Products
· Merchant Accounts
· Forums
· News Sites
· Members Only Sites
· Ad Servers (banner rotation with views and click-through reporting)

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Site Updates: One of the most convincing arguments you can use on the net is fresh content. Users expect the copyright date current. Seeing ©1999 is disheartening. If the web surfer finds a site and sees content added that clearly marks the date and shows the site owner has been there recently, they feel the gears are working, movement is underneath and its not a ghost town. Would you give you credit card to a ghost town? What we recommend is monthly updates. That means twelve a year. If you work around a weekly schedule, you've taken your work load from 12 installments and increased it to 52. If your sole income is from the web, weekly isn't a bad idea. In certain cases, daily updates is recommended.

Typical small business sites can do quite well with a "thing of the month" or small story/news release. Remember, it's not the content itself, by the psychological feeling the user has when stumbling unto a site. Is this site active?

Many small business owners don't know html or don't have time to do these changes. Fine. Outsource when someone can do it better or cheaper. If provided with even an inkling of an idea we can make excellent content updates. For our clients whom we've worked with to produce a site for, we usually charge $100 to do roughly three hours of maintenance and updates a month. After that the charge is about $25/hour, depending on density of the work. For someone who wanted us to manage a site, the billable hours would depend on the volume of work. Hourly rates are to be determined by the level of difficulty of the updating task. Overall, we're easy to work with.

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Traffic Analysis. Very few small businesses use traffic logs to improve their sites. Either they don't know they exist or can't afford some of the software available. But even then they look at their reports with "sites", "visits", "entry pages" "search strings" and do not fully know how to apply change. We can help with improving a site based on traffic reports as well as real marketing data. If you make a product for students, wouldn't it be nice to know how many users are logging on from schools. If you would like to have traffic reports analyzed with actionable reports but don't have the resources to install software, good news. For servers that run Apache (software flavor) you can install and run Webalizer, an open source piece of software which is quite good at giving high level reports on your site. The software is free but installing it will require a labor fee. For just traffic analysis, rates vary from $50 to $150 a month to analyze the traffic logs and write up an objective overview of the site's performance in marketing terms. The language used is similar to this document you are currently reading. Terms and guidelines are intelligent but always rooted in real world experience. Never fluffed to make someone look good.

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Help with Internet Languages: Here at ye olde web forge we do technical stuff and use the best available technologies to create a convincing web site experience that makes money. Why else would you use the Internet, if it weren't fast, reliable and cheap, which it is. It requires knowledge to do it right. SisCon can help with the following web technologies:

· Html
· shtml
· dhtml
· javascript
· ssi (server side includes)
· perl
· php
· MySQL
· Flash™

Two technologies we currently are not working with are JSP and ASP. JSP is costly as it is licensed by Sun Microsystems. It is used mainly for larger e-commerce web sites and despite having really great functionality, is often looked at as being complex and costly to support. There is an open source version but not one worth learning for the amount of work involved with so many other web apps already in use and documented.

ASP is a similar technology licensed from Microsoft (MS). It runs on MS servers and uses MS databases like MS SQL or Access. It is commonly believed amongst the web software community that ASP and MS servers are not only weak functionally but also not very safe or dependable. Often you'll see ASP sites created by either: inexperienced web designers because it was easy to create an ASP site from scratch; or companies that partner with Microsoft and are thus obliged to use thier platform.

On a personal note, during the early 2000s working for web start up company, it was discovered that a large part of the Russian immigrant population was skilled in MS and ASP and thus built sites for companies cheaply. Sounds nutty reading it here but its true. Hard to believe anyone would choose ASP with other more powerful FREE engines available using technologies such as PHP, Perl, Ruby, Python and Zope to name a few.

We also are not currently working with Oracle databases. There is an open source version available but I don't see a reason to switch from MySQL to Oracle.

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