What components go into custom website design?

Aug 31
2009

You tell us, because the number and type of components vary with each site and each business’s unique needs. But there are some essential and popular elements at the core of the design process that are always required:

  • Discovery, planning, management, research and consulting – See above.
  • Project management – Did we mention that we assign a dedicated brand manager to each client?
  • Site navigation design and architecture – So crucial. This sets the pace for your entire brand experience.
  • Homepage style and design – This is the most important part of your site and where we focus the bulk of the design time. A typical homepage has many parts, including the header, menus, main display area (usually interactive), secondary content area (also interactive), advertising and widget areas, and footer.
  • Subpage styles – This is the main template that drives your customers through your site. At times there are multiple unique sub page styles needed.
  • Form style – This is used for all types of data submission, video submission, contacting, blogging, registering and ordering items online.
  • Blog style – This is one of the fastest ways to build a web presence, promote news, interact with potential customers and enhance your SEO efforts.
  • Landing page style – This is used for lead captures, promotions, specials, events, webinars and more. It allows you to increase the ROI of your advertising campaigns and web traffic measurably, and also to test offers and measure results within a specified environment.
  • CMS and development platform – Our CMS allows authorized users to modify text, graphics and subpages easily on the website, without any need for technical HTML knowledge.

What do we charge?

Why beat around the bush? We’ll tell you exactly what it costs. But keep in mind that we hire only the best talent, and we do all our creative work in-house. The cost breaks down into three areas:

  • Discovery and consulting – As mentioned above, we recommend budgeting at least 20 hours for meetings, research, planning, site architecture, sales and marketing consulting, site analytics, and ongoing strategic planning. But we realizes for some budgets and businesses that you may only want to use a few hours for initial discovery. Our rate is $175 per hour (minimum three hours) for a team of managers and creative executives. We offer a retainer option for unlimited meetings, consulting, strategic planning and other services for a flat fee of $5,000 a year. (Great deal, you can pick our brain whenever you want, have unlimited meetings, review site performance, etc.!)
  • Design and animation – The time we invest here depends on the number of unique styles and animations you desire. Our design fees are typically $3,500-$10,000, depending on your specific requirements. (Simple, micro or sites with a few pages can be less)
  • CMS integration and site coding and testing – We charge $2,500 to set up your new designs in either Drupal or WordPress (which is less than many offshore contractors would charge if using our designs). Blog and landing page themes are additional. Subpage/content layout is $225 per page for the first 20 pages and $195 per page thereafter.

 

Web Design Company

Aug 31
2009

There are several terms our clients use to describe our Web design company, but none more accurate than “responsive.” With a Web design and development staff of more than 60 people in offices throughout the country, we have the resources to create a team of specialized professionals who will collaborate with you on your project. We blend their expertise with your company’s vision to create a fully integrated solution that seamlessly combines exceptional graphic Web design, dynamic Web programming and powerful online marketing.

 

As an experienced Web design, development and digital marketing company, we have been developing websites and interactive media projects for small businesses and Fortune 1000 clients alike for more than a decade. Our integrated team approach can handle any interactive venture, including website design, Web application development, Flash and Silverlight development, mobile development, Web marketing, search engine optimization services, social media marketing services, Facebook app development and more. 

Our Florida Web design company headquarters is located in Gainesville, near the University of Florida, where we draw from a pool that is rich in talent and technology education. Our Georgia Web design headquarters is located in the Atlanta area and serves as a center for our client relationships. These two headquarters support our other Web design company offices and personnel throughout the United States, including Tampa, FL.

Can’t afford a new site? Buy an affordable quality website

Aug 30
2009

Whether you are a seasoned pro or new to the Internet, if you are planning on running an online business you are going to need your own website. There are many options to choose from these days ranging from affordable domain name registration, to affordable quality website design. But what if you are on a tight budget and can’t afford all the bells and whistles the Internet has to offer in a brand new website? You will be surprised at the options you have in obtaining an affordable quality website.

There are numerous companies online that offer affordable quality websites for sale. You can buy affordable quality websites or web domain names that already have the traffic and presence on the web. Most companies offer domain hosting for your web address if you do not have a hosting provider. Buying an affordable quality website can be very simple. Find a company that offers the best deals in websites on the net and then just follow the step by step instructions in either creating your own website design from templates or having a consultant and professional web designer do the work for you. Prices can range from $49 or lower or $199 and higher. It all depends on your budget and what you have to work with.

If you are a small start-up company you may not have the financial resources to have a professional design your website. Your best bet in getting a quality affordable website is to seek out companies that allow you to build your own and host it for a small monthly fee. Later as your business grows you can expand and hire a professional to design your site.

When you are in the market to buy an affordable quality website, do your research and don’t go with the first company that you see. Look around a while and see what is out there, you may be surprised at what you find. Often cheap doesn’t necessarily mean quality. Remember you want an affordable quality website, not just any old run of the mill website.

When you are performing your research on web design companies, seek out reviews of their website and the services they have provided to others in the past. Often you will find both satisfied and dissatisfied customers. If the design company has excellent reviews and an excellent track record and can give you the price you are looking for, then by all means begin talking to them and tell them what you are looking for in a website.

Things have changed a lot on the web. Now, finding affordable alternatives to a quality website is not only possible but you can compare and choose the best one that fits your needs. One thing to keep in mind is that you can get an affordable quality website that already exists and has traffic compared to the cost of purchasing a brand new site. If you purchase a website that already exists, it will save you a lot of time in getting the name of the site branded and getting traffic flow to it. Usually a brand new website will cost considerably more than purchasing an affordable quality website already in existence.

Ultimately the choice is up to you and your budget when it comes to buying affordable quality websites. You want an image that conveys professionalism and good customer service. Remember to choose your website and domain name wisely as this is what your customers will see when they visit your site. You want it to reflect the nature of your business and be memorable.

 

Professional website design

Aug 29
2009

Professional website design
Allow our professional website designers to create a custom website design for your company. Not only will Icon Website Design create a stunning website for your company, but we will also have the ability to get your website listed in the Top 10 SEO results of Google, Yahoo, and Bing (MSN).
Custom WEBSITE DESIGN

Based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, we are one of South Florida’s best professional website design companies. Whether you need a basic website design or a custom e-commerce website, the chances are excellent that Icon Website Design can help you increase your company’s visibility and improve its graphic image. Icon Website Design is a full service provider of custom website design and web site programming including lead generating and e-commerce website development. With an award-winning staff of professional web designers, we can assist you with everything from your logo design to your custom website design and development, including flash design, video development, virtual spokesperson creation, image galleries, catalogs, blogs, newsletters, and much more. So whether you need your first website developed, or would like to redesign and improve your current website, give us a call
SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION

We offer a wide range of cost effective search engine optimization packages for our clients. These search engine optimization packages leverage our intensive SEO experience to provide our clients with the internet presence and targeted traffic that they are looking for. We get your site into the Top 10 organic search engine rankings of Google, Yahoo, MSN, and the other search engines through a proven process that we have implemented for over 300 of our clients, that has achieved of 60,000 Top 10 organic search engine rankings. Whether you are looking for local lead generation or national e-commerce sales, we will customize a search engine optimization package to meet your specific needs. For a FREE confidential analysis of your website and the available traffic for your target keywords, .
PAY PER CLICK MARKETING

Through our pay-per-click marketing management, we generated over $5 million in revenue cost-effectively for our clients in 2008. We work directly with Google Adwords, Yahoo Search Engine, and MSN adCenter, and Adready pay-per-click banner advertising to do extensive research and build out highly detailed PPC campaigns that we can effectively test and measure to make sure that your pay-per-click marketing campaign is running as efficiently as possible.

Our compensation package for our pay-per-click marketing management services is unlike any other company that we know. We charge NO SETUP FEE, NO SET MONTHLY FEE, and we apply a $100 GOOGLE AD CREDIT to your account. Icon will be compensated based on the leads and sales that we generate through your website as a results of our efforts.

For more details on our pay-per-click marketing management services, and a FREE analysis of your website and your target keywords,
INTERNET MARKETING & WEBSITE PROMOTION

We offer a wide range of additional internet marketing services to promote your website, including banner advertising, affiliate marketing, email marketing, directory submissions, social media optimization including social networking and social bookmarking, video submissions to YouTube, blog postings, article submissions, press release submissions, and other types of internet marketing.

All of our professioto tell us about your business and find out what we can do to help your business grow!

Online Shopping Experiences

Aug 29
2009

There isn’t a day that goes by that I don’t have to spend money on one thing or another, having to keep up with private school, employees, computers, clients and the list goes on and on.

We’ve either just broke something, the school needs something and of course we can’t live without this something. I spend a lot of time online making purchases. And it doesn’t take long to notice a pattern in the types of websites you buy from and the types of websites you don’t buy from.

Yes, there is a reason that we do or do not buy from a website. In most cases it has nothing to do with the price, and it all happens without us even noticing it.

We go online we know what we want to buy and about how much we want to spend, we are just looking for who we want to buy from.

Things that turn us off are cluttered and confusing sites, colors that make no sense, banners all over the place and an unprofessional look and feel.

So what is it that makes us chose to buy from one website over another?

Let’s pretend that you have just decided to launch your own website and want to give “making a living online” a try.

You’ve worked for months setting up and optimizing your campaigns.

You’ve been working 15 hour days and have constructed keyword lists, done PPC, SEO, SMM, bought banners on related websites, created an affiliate program, created a list and have set up the website analytics.

Yet only a small percent of website visitors take the action that you want them to take.

And now you are wondering what’s wrong?

It’s really a bad feeling, you are getting the traffic to the site but very little is converting to sales. You know there must be a problem but you are not seeing it.

I know how hopeless that feeling can be, and it’s the reason I am writing this now.

Everything you’ve done up until this point, all the money you’ve spent, all the profiles you’ve created, all the hard work you’ve done, every article you’ve written, comes down to a couple precious seconds.

And in those couple seconds you can truthful and accurate represent yourself any way you want.

No one is forcing you to use a certain colors, layouts, pictures, sales copy, call-to-action, or headlines that make up your landing page.

When designing a landing page you are like an artist in front of a blank canvas. The choices you are about to make can move people to action or bore them into leaving within seconds of entering the website.

The feeling is both exciting and scary; don’t believe me, build a landing page and spend a thousand bucks sending people to it and watch your stats to see how many convert so you’ll know rather or not you did a good job.

When you’ve got a landing page that is making you money, every change you make creates an adrenalin rush. You never know if you’ve just made things worse and are now losing money or rather you did something correctly and there is now an increase in sales.

Every day thousands of experts enter our website and they are the ones that determine rather we’ve got it right or not.

Never for one second believe that you are the expert!

I want to show you how to stop ignoring those folks and start listing to them. If for no other reason, the promise of better performing landing pages should be enough.

Think of landing page optimization as being like a giant online laboratory where our subjects are voluntarily participating in our experiments.

You may think I am crazy but think about the number of test subjects you are able to get on a website daily. You can test paid traffic against free traffic, Google against Yahoo and the list just keeps on going.

Statistics allow us to determine the best landing page design for that website as well as the website visitors.

When building a website this way you know you’ve just built a winner, because it is not build on opinion or a company poll, but rather on Web analytics software that has recorded every website visitor along with another large amount of detailed information.

We know on what page a visitor enters our site and on what page they leave. We know how long they looked at each item and rather or not they purchased something before leaving.

A website allows for an amount of data collection that is unheard of in any other marketing platform online or offline.

A Website also allows you to use that data to offer different content and products to different website visitors, or even visitors that have come from different sources.

It’s all about the Landing Page. A Landing Page is the page the website visitor lands on when he or she enters your site. It doesn’t matter if it’s a mini site, stand-alone site, or a page deep inside your main site, a landing page is the page someone lands on when they enter your site.

A conversion happens when a visitor lands on your website and does the action that the page was designed to get them to do. That can be anything from feeling out a form to clicking to another page, the only thing that matters is rather or not the page did what it was designed to do and that there was a measurable value for your business. But you have to keep in mind that conversion rates vary from industry to industry and from website to website.

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