Website Design Photography / Graphic Art Frequently Asked Questions Contact FAQ What does it cost to have a website? Can my website address (domain) be www.MyBusinessName.com? Can you design a logo for my business/website? I want a forum/guestbook/chatroom/gallery on my website. Where will my site be hosted? Do you provide filehosting for mp3's or other media? I want to build my own website. Will you host it? How do I make website come up first on search engines like Google? How long will it take before my website is listed by Google? Somebody told me to use the Meta Keywords Tag to increase my ranking. Did people really ask all these questions? OK. I think I'm interested in a website. Now what? What does it cost to have a website? This depends entirely on the size and scope of the website you need. For the smallest of websites, the minimum price is $15 per month. This charge covers hosting and no more than one hour per month of updates or changes. Websites that will require more time and attention will of course cost a little more. Can my website address (domain) be www.MyBusinessName.com? As long as somebody else hasn't already beat you to it. Check Whois Source (www.whois.sc) to find out if the address you want is available. Also, you are not limited to just one domain. You can purchase several variations of the domain (about $10 each) and point them to the same website. Can you design a logo for my business/website? I'll give it a shot, but honesly I'm not that great at it unless you already have a solid idea about what you want. You may be better off going to John Deaton (www.deatondesigns.com) for that. I want a forum/guestbook/chatroom/gallery on my website. No problem. These can easily be installed and customized to fit your site. However, any moderator privileges and duties will be your responsiblity unless we discuss otherwise. Where will my site be hosted? I host websites on Hostgator's (www.hostgator.com) Gator20 server in Boca Raton, Fl. Through my account with Hostgator I can guarantee 99.9% uptime, virtually no size or bandwidth limitations. Do you provide filehosting for mp3's or other media? Stand-alone filehosting is not available. However, if you are an artist or a band and you want to offer your work through a website, that is perfectly fine. I want to build my own website. Will you host it? No, sorry. I recommend Hostgator as an affordable and powerful hosting option. Their plans start at $6.95 a month with more space (3.5GB) and bandwidth (50GB) than you'll probably ever need. Sign up through this link and make me $50 bucks richer! How do I make website come up first on search engines like Google? The goal is to get a high Google ranking by following the Google quality guidelines. One major key is to keep the content of the page (text) as relevant as possible to what a surfer may be searching for. If you think your customer would be searching for Model Trains in Harlan County, then you want the words "Model", "Trains", "Harlan" and "County" on the front page of your website. You would also want other websites related to model trains or Harlan County linked to your website. Every relevant link to your website increases your Google ranking. How long will it take before my website is listed by Google? You cannot manually list your website on Google, but you can submit your website to a list to be "crawled." Within 48 hours your website will be visited by Google's spider, Googlebot (I'm not making ths up), which will determine your page ranking and add your site to the directory. Googlebot, along with other search engine spiders, will routinely check your website for updates and adjust your ranking. Somebody told me to use the Meta Keywords Tag to increase my ranking. Please tell them they are wrong!!! This used to be the case but today things are different. People began abusing Meta Tags by putting using unrelated but commonly searched Keywords like "sex" to attract more visitors, so the Keywords Tag became unreliable and has been abandoned by every major search engine. Now search engines determine what your page is about by the content of the text. Did people really ask all these questions? No. I'm not sure if people ever really ask the questions on these things. OK. I think I'm interested in a website. Now what? Get a good solid idea of what you need from a website, what it should contain and what it may look like. Decide whether the content will need to be updated regularly and how often. After that, call me or email me. Thank you! If you have any questions, please feel free to call or e-mail me. @ 2005 Brandon Goins. All Rights Reserved.