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I am the owner of Michael Web Design. I studied art and design and speech communication at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and briefly studied architecture at Columbia University in NY. I have made artwork as a hobby since I was a child, and as I got more into computers my interests gravitated toward web design. I have been creating websites as a full time career for several years (and as a hobby for many more), and these days I focus on building my business and delegating the construction of the sites to my wonderful employees.
Any Internet marketing strategy needs to take advantage of searching. Search engine optimization is the first place to start this process. This video covers the details of how to optimize a specific web page for search engines.
How To DO SEO from Eric Holter.
This is a quick guide for beginners new to WordPress. For more detailed information, you can always ask me and I’ll be glad to help.
To log in to your site:
At any time, you can click the Visit Site button at the top of the page to return to your site. You might want to bookmark the link you entered in Step 1 for future reference.
Pages are for content such as About Me, Contact Me, Legal Information, Company Information, etc. Pages are often used to present information about your company or your site that is somehow timeless — information that is always applicable. You can use Pages to organize and manage any amount of content. (By the way, it’s a good idea to always have an About page and a Contact page — see this advice from Lorelle.) You create pages by clicking the Add New tab under the Pages heading. Add a title and content, and then click the Publish button. At …
I use WordPress on all of my clients’ websites, unless they specifically request another content management system, and here is why:
WordPress is a state-of-the-art publishing platform. It allows you to add and remove pages, edit content, add blog posts, review comments and more, all within a well designed and regularly updated web interface. The workflow is intuitive, and it stays out of your way, giving you only the tools you need, and only when you need them.
It allows for entirely custom design layouts and unlimited templates. With WordPress, it’s simple to create one template for the home page, another for regular pages, another for blog posts, etc.
There are, as of this writing, 4,245 available plugins on the WordPress website. Plugins can extend WordPress to do almost anything you can imagine, from shopping carts to image galleries to contact forms.
The WordPress website claims over 22 million downloads of the software. With this many users, they offer almost endless plugins, fantastic documentation, active user forums, and regular maintenance and feature updates. Many web designers know WordPress so you can feel secure that you will always …
These prices assume you are a business or organization looking for a site with a professional design and the ability to easily add/edit/remove pages and blog posts. If you are looking for something else, such as e-commerce capability or highly customized features, we will have to negotiate further.
At this time, a standard website is around $1500. A website at this price comes with a rock-solid system to update your website for free, using any web browser (like Internet Explorer or Firefox), from any computer with Internet access. You also get a simple (but beautiful) design and a fully featured blog. You get a website that is set up with SEO (search engine optimization) in mind, and Google Analytics installed to monitor how many people are going to your site and how they got there.
In most cases, bells and whistles like extra plugins, unique page designs, email setup and extra graphics push the price up into the $2000 range. From there, the price can continue rising if you need more custom work. Any extra work is billed at $75/hour, and we will give …
I studied Art & Design and Speech Communication at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign, and briefly worked toward a Masters degree in Architecture at Columbia University in New York. I eventually withdrew from my graduate program, recognizing that I was entering the wrong field. I had done web design as a side job for several years, and realized that I was far happier creating websites than making blueprints and site plans.
I worked at several web design firms upon returning to Chicago. These jobs didn’t offer me the control over my projects that I wanted, and often produced sites in chunks, with designers and developers having little internal communication. For these reasons I started my own web design firm, and I am now free to take on any project I want and can see it through from beginning to end. I truly enjoy my job, and I take pride in my craft and build every website as if it were my own.
Many of my first time clients don’t fully understand how websites work, but they need to make an educated purchase nonetheless. If you’re in that category, here’s everything you need to know:
If you want to build a website you will need to rent space to store the actual files that make up the website; this is called hosting. I do all of my hosting through Telana, and if you don’t already have a host I can set up hosting for you through their secure servers. I charge $100/yr and offer the advantage that you only have to deal with one person for all of your website needs.
Along with a web host, you will also need to rent a domain name, such as www.google.com. You can rent a domain name at domain.com, with most priced around $9/year. I can set this up for you if you prefer.
Once you have these two requirements, hosting and a domain, your website can be installed.
We discuss the requirements and goals for the site, in terms of both design and functionality. Once …