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Giving you and your business the internet presence it deserves at a price you can afford! |
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Frequently Asked Questions
Why can't I see the changes that have been completed on my website?Several reasons:
Printing your website showroom pages:Many of you have asked how to print your showroom pages without the right column being cut in half. You can easily do this by resetting the page setup options in your browser. In Microsoft Explorer, go to File, then Page Setup, then reset the margins down to .25” and your pages should print completely.Why aren't my requests for work completed immediately?Work orders are usually completed within 2-3 weeks from initiation so plan ahead if you need revisions to your site. When we receive your work order, you will be sent a confirmation of estimated cost and completion date. If it is an emergency, just give us a call. We always reserve a part of our day to assist people who have forgotten to tell us about an upcoming sale or that their store has moved to a new location. To keep your costs down, we must balance work load with the our costs of overhead and personnel. We would have to raise fees substantially to keep staff just sitting around waiting for a customer to call. Our staff is busy because we are successful and good at what we do. Would you want to have surgery done by a doctor that had a wide open schedule? Probably not. If I bought a piece of furniture today, would you be able to complete the finishing within a week? Probably not. Our work load is very similar. How long does it take to build a site?FastTrack sites take about 2-3 weeks to complete. QuickStart dynamic sites take approximately 2-3 months. Custom sites can range anywhere from one month to one year. Just like building a new home, the less time spent with changes and the more organized the format of the information you give us, the less time it will take to construct your site. Ecommerce sites have other factors to consider. An ecommerce site is built in 3 basic steps, and at the end of the process, all the pieces are put together just like a puzzle. One step is to collect all of your image files for the items you wish to display on the web, and begin optimizing them for the web and creating a large copy of each photo along with a thumbnail copy. Each image must be named in a specific fashion to match the database. Another step is to start building your database of information about each inventory in an excel format, with all of the pertinent information about each piece of merchandise. And third, we begin the design look of your site – the colors, the page content, the buttons, and navigation structure. We work on all of these items simultaneously, with the tasks being handled by different people on our staff. Other influences on this timeline are our current schedule of work at the time the deposit is made, how many inventory items you require, and how complex and customized you want the site to be. Why can’t I have bigger pictures?You can. Why isn’t my site up 100% of the time?You can count on service 99% of the time. Interruptions to service can be caused by many things such as power outages, phone line failures or problems at the local ISP level. Please contact our office if you have a problem - we will review the situation and advise you. What can I do about spam?First of all, understand that spam is a part of our digital life, and nobody can control all of it. You will need to filter spam on two levels: at your local ISP mail server, and in your email software such as Outlook Express. We also filter known spam addresses on our servers - however they change aliases daily so it is an ongoing and ever increasing problem. Here is what to do:
The cost of spam is high and it will continue until we have to pay for email. Spammers will not stop sending millions of messages a day until it hurts their pocketbook. What is a dynamic database site?It is helpful to know the difference between a dynamic site and a static site. A static site resides in its entirety on the server. When the viewer clicks on a static site page, the entire page loads along with all of the images on that page. So if there are 20 images, the page loads faster than it would if there were 200 images. Obviously this limits the amount of images you should put on a page. If it loads too slowly, customers leave! On our static sites, we use only small thumbnail images to speed up the process, allowing the customer to bring up a larger version of any single furniture photo that they are interested in. We recommend that customers limit a static site to about 500 images, spread over about 8 pages of showrooms. Most of our clients start with static sites for budgeting purposes (they are much less expensive to build). As web initiated sales increase, clients often move up to dynamic sites as they become more comfortable with the amount of business their web sites generates. If a larger site is required, or a shopping cart is desired, you need a "dynamic" site. In a dynamic site, the size is unlimited. The pages are created “on the fly” as the viewer accesses the site, hence the word "dynamic". For example, if a customer is searching for chairs, only the chairs load and the page is created in seconds as the customer clicks on the search function, showing only the furniture they are interested in. Customers can search for chairs, or maple chairs, or chairs from a specific manufacturer, or any other number of parameters. Having a shopping cart does not mean you ship furniture all over the country. You can set up your shopping cart in several ways. Option one: The shopping cart allows the customer to choose only two delivery options: your local delivery service or customer pickup. Option two: Use the shopping cart to offer your standard local delivery for large items and national UPS shipping only for small items. Or you could offer national shipping, or only shipping to the three or four states that surround yours. Having a dynamic site does not mean you have to offer a shopping cart, but you must have a dynamic site to have a good shopping cart. Your policy of shipping inventory should be dictated by the cost and ease of shipping from your local area. Shipping furniture on a national basis is more feasible for stores located in states such as New York and California, than a state such as South Dakota. We recommend that you build a dynamic site for any of the following reasons: a more sophisticated look, faster loading pages, large amounts of inventory can be listed, and the site can be managed through a database. Do not plan on large volume national sales of armoires!I get emails from people asking me if they can exchange links with me? What should I do?Check out the referred site first. The more relevant incoming links the better, but they MUST be from relevant sites – sites with similar content. That is why we put all the energy into the portal directories – they link in TO your site. When search engines find a site with incoming relevant links, they also treat the site as important to rank in their search engine database. In addition, it is not always a good idea to link AWAY from your site because, obviously, it just distracts prospects into leaving. Just send us the domain name, and we will advise you on how to proceed.How do I access the statistics reports for my website?Your statistics reports are password protected. Contact our office if you have lost your passwords and usernames. The online reports are included in the monthly service package – you can review them online at any time. The reports are in a “month to date” format. You will see statistics for the current month shown on your browser screen. Previous months are archived - just click on the month or year.
To help you understand more about the report and the traffic coming to your site, the following is a list of definitions for the report categories.
Your monthly fee is higher than most people charge for hosting. Why?That is because it is more than just hosting. For our unfinished furniture customers, it is a comprehensive web marketing and promotion service. The entire package is very reasonable. Sell 2 armoires from web-initiated sales, and you have paid for the annual fee! 1. Part of the fee covers advertising on 3 portals and inclusion in 3 web rings. We spend thousands of dollars each year to keep the national directories of www.buyunfinishedfurniture.com, www.unfinishedfurnitureyellowpages.com and www.unfinishedfurniturevillage.com in the top of the national search engines. We pay thousands of dollars each year to keep www.buyunfinishedfurniture.com in the top 6 nationally for the keywords "unfinished furniture". The cost is shared among all of our clients. You need this national exposure for the beginner on the web that is searching under "unfinished furniture". These portals bring in new customers. We also place you in 3 internal web rings that take search engines directly to your site. Search engines LOVE sites that have relevant incoming links. Only we can provide the internal web rings for our unfinished furniture industry clients! 2. The second part of the fee, and the bulk of it, is the cost of your personal search engine submission program. We keep you in the top 10-12 ranking, locally, regionally and state wide. Keep in mind your ranking changes daily, hourly, and weekly. One day you can be second, the next you can be number 10. We have staff that specialize in overseeing the presence of your site on the web. Each search engine has different algorithms, or "rules". Certain search engines restrict the words on the home page, some like more to see more words, and so on. These rules change each month, so each month we change your site to meet the new criteria. Some engines we submit to everyday, some engines we can only submit to monthly, or weekly. Some submissions can automated; others have to be submitted by hand. In addition, every year search engines go out of business, others come into the market, and mergers are common. We spend an average of 2-3 hours each month working on your site ranking. If you don’t promote your site, it is like putting a ship on the ocean without sails (or sales, if you will excuse the pun) Note: If you plan to ship furniture nationally, and want to be in the top national ranking on an individual basis for the keywords "unfinished furniture", you will need to budget your monthly site submission costs anywhere from $500 to $2000 per month. 3. The third part of your fee is the storage cost of your site. With all the inventory pictures, furniture sites are much bigger than average, and require more processing space also. And our servers have triple backup systems, are on the largest data pipeline in the united states, and our server administrator carries a pager to alert him if they go down. We provide free, on-line statistics reports for you to track the details of traffic to your site. |
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