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New or Updated Web Site FAQ

We are frequently asked to help companies design a new web site for them or to re-do their existing web sites.

This page is designed to help you get started in the process by figuring out what you are looking for.

Getting Started

We need to define the "look-and-feel" of your site. The best way to do this is to surf around and see what other people are doing, and see what you like and don't like. We can use your preferences as a starting point in the design of your site.

Please list some of the web sites you have visited that will help us to get a feel for how you want your site to look. Be sure to include the internet addresses (URL's) of the sites so that we can go and see them ourselves to see what you are talking about.

1) List some web sites that you like the look and feel of, and what about them you like:

Web Sites That I Like	What I Like About Them

2) List some web sites that you don't like the look and feel of, and what about them you don't like:

Web Sites That I Don't Like	What I Don't LikeAbout Them

3) How do you want to differentiate yourself from your competition?

4) Why should the customer buy from you instead of your competitors? What do you offer that they don't?

4) Do you want to focus on a limited geographic area or the whole Net, or both?

5) What products do you want to focus on?

6) What skill level of user are you targeting? Do you want basic information or highly technical?

7) Provide your company's name, address, and contact information:

8) Provide a basic summary of your company history and/or the backgrounds of key people:

9) Do you want to present the company as the "entity" that people will deal with, or the "individual people at the company" as the channel for people to talk to? (a "typical" corporate style, or a "personalized" corporate style)?

10) Any key educational or informational points you want to make in your web site?

11) Do you want to link to any other site? (Only link to other sites if you have a very good reason to - you don't want to send your traffic
elsewhere)

12) Are you "the authority" on any particular topics?

13) Do you have any special affiliations for memberships that you want to promote on your site?

14) Do you already have a logo or other artwork associated with your company? Do you have a digital (computer) copy of it that we can use on your site. How do you want it presented?

15) Do you have a particular corporate color scheme or corporate "look-and-feel" already designed? If so, it is usually good to make the web site use the same scheme.

16) What different sections do you want in your web site. The most common are:

Introductory Home Page
About Our Company
Contact Information
Products and/or Services

17) What text (content) do you want for each page.

Writing Content

The next step is to figure out specifically what you want to say in your web site.

For each section of your web site, write at least a few paragraphs to give a sense of what you want to say.

It is important that you at least sketch out what you want, so that it reflects your personal style, instead of being just another site in our own words.

It doesn't have to be perfect, we can do whatever editing needs to be done before it goes up.

How to Get it Done Quickly

When most people want their web site work done, they want it done quickly.

We want it done quickly, too.

However, in our experience there is one single factor that makes the process take longer: Completeness.

What typically happens is that we sit down to do the work on your site, and start assembline the materials based on the questions and answers you've given us, the content you have emailed to us, and the graphics provided for the site.

We start working on the site, and get to a point where we are missing a key element needed to complete it.

At that point we have to stop working on the site, email you for the required information, and then move on to other projects until we get that information back.

At that point, you have left the "top of the pile" so to speak, and we will need to complete the other work that we have now started on since we couldn't go any further on your site due to the missing information.

If you can make sure that we have all the information that we need to complete the site at the time we start it, it will make the process go much more quickly for both of us.

Information we need to work on your web site

In order to make changes to your web site, we need to know how to access your site so that we can update your existing site with your new one. Most sites are updated by FTP (File Transfer Protocol). For these sites you will need to provide us with the following information.

FTP Server name:
FTP User name:
FTP Password:
FTP Directory for files:

If you do not know this information, please contact your web provider (or give us authorization to do it for you) and they will be able to provide it.

Web Site Hosting

In addition to designing your site, we can also host it for you to provide complete one-stop service for you.

Web Site Design is the process of creating your web site.

Web Site Hosting is the "publishing" side of it, where we make it available to people on the Internet by placing your site on our High-Speed Servers which are connected to the Internet by High-Speed lines. This ensures that all people will be able to access your pages quickly and reliability. Our servers are extremely reliable and experience little or no down time.

For current rates for Design and Hosting, please refer to our Rate Card.

For More Information

If you have additional questions not answered here, please email support@virtcert.com and we will be happy to help you however we can.

Refer to our Support pages for more information on the features of VirtCert.com and how to use them

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