Web site designer
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Unless web design is your profession or hobby,
chances are sinking a few weeks of your time into something that
is not really your knitting is a waste you would want to avoid.
The alternative is to find a professional to
build your site for you - just like you'd find a qualified
dentist to work on your teeth.
Our web designer service will buy you a professionally
designed web site built on a stable, sophisticated en extendible
technical platform for less than R 5 000 ex VAT.
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We see a web site as a tool to communicate with current and
new customers: You
know your own products and services
better than anyone, and you understand your market and
your clients better than we do. As a team though you can
use our technical expertise and experience to effectively market
your business online.
Think of us as your
megaphone. It is your voice amplified by our
technology.
We
accomplish this by empowering your web site with a content management system.
We help you write the content. We
help pick keywords that will bring qualified leads to your
site. We help optimize your web site content so that
search engines (like Google) rank you as high as possible - or
at least as high as your content allows.
Once we have your site online, we monitor it's effectiveness
with sophisticated statistics (you get a weekly report) and we use
software to monitor the web daily for any mention about your
product or your site. We can
even watch your competitors for you if you like.
In essence we act as your partner: we
know how to write copy (like this page), so
we will ask you for a list of ideas, facts, arguments and unique
selling propositions. We use your input
as basis for a web site sales letter that we craft to maximize the
chances of turning web visitors into a prospects and later into
clients.
An effective web site depends on a process of continuous
tuning, feedback, refinement and adjusting for best results.
This is how do we do it:
Please read on for more detail on each of the above,
or skip to the end and ask us any question about your
unique needs.
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Content management system (CMS)
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A content management system is software that lives on
your web server. (We use
Joomla -
considered to be one of the best web content management systems
available.)A custom built web site without a standard
framework is like a
gadget invented by the proverbial
mad scientist.
No one understands how or why it works...and forget about fixing it
when it breaks.
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It is like having to use someone else's
self-invented indexing and filing system.
The genius of the web designer
is not the problem - the lack of standards and a common framework
are because it makes maintaining and
protecting your
investment in your web site much more
difficult. Doubly so if the original designer is no longer
available or unwilling to maintain his work.
Even if your designer provides you with excellent
documentation for his custom design, a new web designer will still need a
lot of time to understand and familiarize themselves with it.
Nine times out of ten you will be advised to throw out the old
design in favor of a new one - it will probably be
cheaper to
start from scratch rather than bolt on new pieces or cut into existing
components.
And so the
wasteful cycle repeats endlessly
- redesign after redesign after redesign after expensive redesign.
In most cases a web site "touch-up" is only
cosmetic in nature - intended to keep your site looking fresh and professional.
This is where a content management system excels: it enables you to
change the layout, colors and look and feel of your site within
minutes - without impacting the content that took so long to
develop.
Even better: any person (and there are thousands) who
understand a content management system like Joomla will be able to
help with your web site...because it is a standard framework
and well understood by professionals in the industry.
Because your site is built on a standard
framework, it is easier, faster and less expensive to maintain.
Your investment is protected.
The second major point where a content management
system comes to it's own is when adding
interactive features.
Many are surprised how even the simplest
interactive feature (eg poll, newsfeed, etc) can be quite tricky and
expensive to build from scratch.
How does Joomla or any other good content management
system compare?
A Single, consistent administrative interface.
Single database. Everything in one place. An
internet full of wheels
you don't have to re-invent .
Adding new functions are easy: There are
thousands of modules you can "plug-in" to the standard
Joomla framework to give you shopping carts, product catalogs,
newsletter subscriptions, polls, reviews, etc, etc.
You can manage your own content with only a few hours of practice.
No worries about things like HTML or Java code, FTP
accounts and publishing, PHP or ASP scripting, etc. All the
technical "plumbing" is taken care of.
Our initial design for you will be a fully functional
content management web site built on a design template of your
choice. It includes a "Home" page, a "Contact us page"
with auto responder, an "About us" page and a "Products/services"
- on a "layout" (design template) of your choice.
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Web design principles
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The "beauty" of a design (including web designs) is often said to
be subjective: in the eye of the beholder.
Allow me to bust that
myth:
Certain principles and design techniques are objective and
measurable. A (subjective) "pretty" web site cannot
compete with an effective web site.
"Beauty", eg, colors have a specific, measurable psychological effect on people. Another example: The "rule of
thirds" in a layout significantly
affects the perceived "beauty" of your site.
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We've improved badly designed web sites to load orders of
magnitude faster (4 to 10 times) by simply optimizing images. Some
"web designers" have the
misguided idea that their experience in print advertising qualify them for web
design. A web site is not an electronic version of
a flyer or poster. To go that route is
certain
failure.
Another very common error amongst inexperienced web designers are
lack of clarity on "most desired response". As any good
designer will understand - form must follow function. How can
you achieve that if the
function of the web site is unclear? What is the
most desired response? (See this article about "A
spade does not a hole make" and "single
most desired response" for more...)
So what are Cozahost's qualifications you may ask?
We eat our own pudding:
we built a multi mullion rand South
African company using ONLY internet marketing.
These are the same skills we are offering you.
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Content
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The quality of the content on your site and how it guides visitors
to your most desired response is perhaps the single most important
aspect of a successful web site.Of course no-one understand your
company and products better than
you do, so your input is the essential basis for the content we
develop: your product specifications, customer testimonials, your unique
selling proposition, your most desired response for the web site,
etc.
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We will even help you locate
free content you can
re-publish on your site. Information your potential customers
will find useful, entertaining or relevant to the product or service
you are offering...or maybe interactive news, weather or maps.
Nothing is more important
than quality information on your web site if you hope to achieve
high ranking in search engines and convert visitors into prospects.
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Performance measurement
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The old management adage "you can't manage what you don't measure"
is as accurate in the new internet age as it was in the industrial
age a hundred years ago.The principle is so
self evident it needs no
elaboration.
To measure your web site's success our we first determine what the most
desired response is, then we implement Google's analytics statistics
package to identify and measure how visitors enter your site and are
"funneled" to the most desired response.
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We work to improve firstly the percentage of
web visitors entering the funnel and secondly the number of visitors
turned into conversions, ie visitors who performed the most desired
response (ask for contact, quote, information, download something,
etc), ie completed goals. We do not concentrate visitor
numbers because that is not the goal. More leads are. It is better to have
10 leads from 100 visits than 1 lead from 1000 visits.
You get a
weekly emailed report detailing the number of visitors,
most popular content on your web site, where visitors came from, goals
achieved, time spent on your site, etc.
We use this report to constantly fine-tune your
web site.
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Keyword selection
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Selecting the correct keywords to optimize your web site is critical
to attracting quality web visitors that can be converted into
prospects.For instance, let's use a hypothetical client as case
study:
The client owns a bed and breakfast (B&B) in Cape Town so she
approached us to help market it for her.
She suggested we use the keywords "bed and breakfast" to
optimize her site.
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18. 9 million web pages compete for a high ranking on the "bed
and breakfast" search term.
Our tools showed that 65% of people who searched for "bed and
breakfast" want to do business (commercial
intent). However, we can increase the commercial
intent by 16% (to 81%) by improving the search term to "bed
and breakfast cape town". That's a pretty significant
improvement.
Not only is the commercial intent more favorable, the location of
a establishment like this is intrinsically part of the product.
Adding "cape town" is therefore a good improvement. We don't want people
searching for a B&B in Chernobyl to visit our site anyway.
With a little tweaking we discover that the commercial intent
improves to 88% for the search term "cape town bed and breakfast".
Still the same term, just a different order.
We dig a bit deeper and we find our client will face
970 000 web pages in
competition for her search term "cape town bed and
breakfast". We drop the "and" to come up with a new search term:
"cape town bed breakfast"
Our new search term reduces competition to 650 000 pages and
increases the commercial intent to 96% PLUS there are 23% more
people searching on this term.
So, in total, our client's new search term (for which her site
must be optimized) reduced competition by 18.3 million pages and improved commercial
intent to 96%. We can even tell her her that
27% of her web site visitors will be in the 25 to 34 age bracket and 60% will
be women.
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Search engine optimization (SEO)
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Research shows that almost 80% of people find goods or services
online by using searching engines. A high ranking on a search
engine like Google is the
single most important factor determining
your online success.Search engine optimization is the process of
writing your content and search terms in a way web search
engines "like" so that they give you a high ranking.
In other
words, your site is displayed on the first page of results.
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Search engines change the way they work all the time. Their goal
is to provide their users with more relevant web search results. Making sure your site
stays "liked" by
the search engines is fundamental to your web success...so
we monitor it and make adjustments when necessary.
We make sure search engines can find your web pages, and we
submit your site to make it "visible" to the search engines.
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Social media
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The Yankee group, a leading research firm, found that 70% of
consumers use their social networks (online and offline) to make
purchase decisions. 50% of them use social media daily.Facebook has more than 500 million users. The average user has 130
"friends" (contacts).
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One hundred and fifty million people use Facebook on their cell
phones and have instant web access to their social circles all the
time...from anywhere.Now, instead of discussing the relative
merits of one product versus another at a braai with a few select
friends, consumers flag their "likes", and express their discontent
with products and services...with an average of 130 people at a
time...each linked to 130 people.
Do the sums.
We help to integrate Facebook and Twitter to your web site by taking
care of all the technical issues.
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Competitive intelligence
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The reputation of a company (ie it`s goodwill) is maybe one of it`s
most important assets.Reputations can be destroyed on the internet
in a matter of days. Studies found that people will use their social
networks to voice dissatisfaction with a product or service.
They warn their friends and vent their frustration online.
They can do this on Facebook, Twitter, blog web sites. We monitor all of
these for you (daily) and we will let you know when your company's
name is
mentioned ANYWHERE on the web.
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We can also monitor your main competitors - you will see when
they make press releases or are mentioned on a web site.
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Pricing
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Our service combines the initial build of an industry
standard and state of the art content management system with the
application of our practical experience and skills to make your web
site an asset to your
company - for less than R 5 000.We apply special components, technologies and
techniques to design and manage your web site on an ongoing basis.
Some of our "methods" are so sensitive we regard them as trade
secrets - we cannot allow our competitors access to them.
With your enthusiastic support and input plus our technical and
internet marketing experience, we make an un-beatable team.
Costing for initial
setup, design and web site build: R 4 800.00 Ex VAT.
This includes:
- Registration of a domain name if you don't
currently have one.
- Installation and configuration of the Joomla
content management system
- Site design based on your design template choice
- Standard pages: home, about us, contact us with
automatic responder, products/services
- Additional features on request, such as news,
photo gallery, events calendar, interactive map, shopping
cart, most read contents lists, discussion forums, blogs,
etc.
It also includes 8 hours of web designer
time to install and configure any custom components you may require
- after the initial design. (A typical static web page takes
about 30 minutes to build and link into the framework)
Monthly retainer
is R 295.00 Ex VAT - a debit order or automated credit card
authorization is required - and includes all the
services you've read about on this page, full web hosting and
email services (all the
features of our web hosting service), free 1 Gb ADSL account, plus 4 hours web designer time per month.
The 4 hours web designer retainer is in addition to time
spent on general routine maintenance work (like software upgrades)
and ongoing performance management and search engine optimization.
Additional web
designer time can be scheduled at R
150.00 Ex VAT per half hour.
For custom projects, we produce special quotes with special
rates on request.
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Next steps
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Would you like ask us a question or tell
us about your special requirements? Get the opinion of a
professional web designer?
Just fill in the fields below and a real live web designer
person will get back to you ASAP:
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