How Little Miami Web Works with YOU.
Start With Nothing but an Idea. End Up With a Great Website.
Your website can start with an idea… when you deal with Little Miami Web Works.
You say that you don’t have time to think about WordPress, servers, TCP/IP, hosting services, domains, or other technical details?
PERFECT! Little Miami Web Works provides websites and related services to busy businesses that are busy making revenue and helping their customers. We’ll plan, design, build and test your new business website. You keep your day job… You just supply the ideas, and the feedback. We supply website results.
And after delivery of your finished site, we provide competitive, full managed hosting services for your new website. We think about “web sitey” things so you don’t have to.
Getting Started – What it Takes
You, the business owner will generally start the ball rolling. Contact us through any of three convenient means: call us and leave a message, or email us, or use one of the contact forms on this site.
Preliminary Consultation – Touching Base
This is the “sales call.” Plan for 15 to 30 minutes (at VERY most) for this call. When we speak with you (generally it will be Don Wallace, the owner, speaking with you) you’ll tell us a little about your business, and why you’re looking to build a website.
Together, we’ll make a determination whether Little Miami Web is a good fit for your business, and vice versa. It may be the case that your project is or is not a good fit for us.
If things seem to be a “go” at both ends, we can do one of two things. We can move directly toward your website project. Please skip down to the heading “How Your Website Project Actually Begins”. Or, more cautiously, you may pay us for a Design and Strategy Consultation. That fee applies directly to the price of your website project – should you proceed with us.
If your project is very complex or demands outside research in order to determine a scope of effort, we (at our end) may insist on a design and strategy consultation. We’ll try to bracket the price range of the final website project before we schedule this consultation.
Design and Strategy (Paid) Consultation Session
If you’d like to test the waters before proceeding with a website project, the paid consultation is an ideal option. Important note… your consultation fee applies toward the price of your project if you decide to move forward with a website.
(Please note that we always provide consultation on your business goals and our process in any website project. We don’t just start coding and writing copy without a full understanding of your needs. You can simply choose to “unbundle” the consultation and ask to pay only for that service up-front and not commit to a website yet. It costs the same and your time investment is the same, either way.)
The consultation will be a high-value, enlightening and informative analysis of your website business goals and the specific way in which we can help you achieve those goals.
Plan for a total of 1 hour to 90 minutes of phone time, at most, plus a quantity of email exchanges. Together we will explore exactly what you expect from your website, in the context of your business. We will talk about whatever your website project demands: technology alternatives, custom hosting solutions, e-commerce and payment mechanisms, content delivery, content marketing needs by email or with a blog, social media integration with your site.
Normally the consultation fee is non-refundable. Only in the very unexpected event that we can’t help you and your concept is out of our depth, we’ll refund your consultation fee on request. We currently charge $99 for consultation for a website project for freelancers and one person startup businesses in the planning phase. We charge $199 for businesses currently in operation with two or more employees, and for any highly customized solutions such as online course sites, complex downloadable product services, and other complex e-commerce site requirements. The reason for this price breakdown is that almost all startup, freelancer and one person businesses are generally looking for fairly straightforward solutions and technologies. More complex plans and businesses demand more talk, more communication, more planning, and perhaps external research into technology or solutions.
Beginning Your Website Project – Business First
We ask you, the business or owner for three things in order to produce your website:
- Deposit: We’ll schedule your project and begin work as soon as possible – once we receive a deposit payment from you for the project. Please understand that this payment does not always trigger work to commence immediately. We have other clients, and we need to be fair to them also.
- Contract: We make as certain as humanly possible that you understand the website development process, and we ask for your signed agreement on payment terms, delivery dates, our duties, and your role as project stakeholder.
- Your Time and Attention, plus your existing marketing materials and other collateral, if available. We need your input in order to build your website and create its content. And if you have an existing website that contains copy that you’d like to use or adapt, we’ll need that as well. If we agreed to set up a portfolio, or case studies of your own projects, we need access to that information as well.
Our Job: Design, Build, Test, Deliver
Once we’ve mutually “nailed” all of the business-related aspects of the project. Little Miami Web Works will begin working on your project. Here’s a nutshell of these four related project phases:
- Design always comes first. A theme (a style and look) is selected for your new website. Design is the arrangement of the visual elements of the site: menus, front page/home page layout, blog appearance, colors and font selections, etc. We always solicit your input for your preferences, as the client and ultimate site owner, using our ideas for your design. We will try to steer you toward concepts that we know make a positive impact on your business’s actual benefit from the site. (For example, the appearance and design of a “opt in” page can drastically affect how many new subscribers you see.) We may include allowances for specific design activities such as wire frame trial layouts and multiple major revisions.
- Building Your Website comes next, after we have mostly nailed the site design and look. We will use your copy, or write new copy (text for your website); select stock photography or use your own images; and we fill out every page of the website that we mutually determined is necessary. Behind the scenes, we also install security measures such as plugins and extra software that ensure that your site isn’t hacked and defaced, plugins that provide search engine related features, and plugins that add features or interaction.
- Testing is our process for making certain that interactive features of your website work when your site is delivered. Also, we test your site as a whole continually and use it as a real visitor would. We test by actively using any features of the site that a visitor can interact with. We’ll resolve any problems before delivery. Features we test include contact forms that allow visitors to ask you questions about your services, email list opt-in forms, and e-commerce features such as online sales forms.
- Delivery means that we install your website onto your choice of hosting service. Or, we set up your website on our own hosting server. Either way, your site goes live to the public and the world when it’s delivered.
Living With Your Business Website
Upon delivery and final payment, your website is yours. It will be a great statement of your business’s values, value-added benefits, and vital information for the buying public. At the same time your website may be an inbound marketing machine that drives names and email addresses of possible new customers to you, and also it may even sell products or services for you.
But there are technical and business issues in making your website visible to the world. Let’s run through them so you understand what really comes after delivery.
Web Hosting Ins and Outs
Your website doesn’t jump onto the internet and run itself. That’s what hosting is for.
Web hosting means that someone’s very fast internet-connected computer is constantly displaying your website to the entire world, 24×7. This is simply not something you set up on a home office or even a business office computer. The reasons are both complex and mundane. But let’s just say that if you want to be open for business on the internet you must host your website at a web hosting service.
Note that hosting is a always a paid service, not something we or anyone else is obliged to supply for free.
There’s two ways we can approach hosting your new website built by Little Miami Web Works:
- You’d host your site with a hosting company. There are many choices in this space: you’ve certainly heard of Godaddy.com, HostGator, BlueHost, WpEngine, as well as well known business class hosting companies such as Rackspace and even cable internet companies such as Comcast and Time Warner.
Or…. - You contract with Little Miami Web Works to host your site. We run multiple Virtual Private Server (VPS) accounts with high speed, high availability and low latency to North American and world wide visitors. We provide site management services as a key part of this service.
Now, What Happens When…?
So … your business website has been built, it looks great, and you’re receiving a nice stream of new leads and sales from the site.
Now something new, unexpected and bad happens:
- Your website becomes unreachable.
- Or your website suddenly has errors.
- Or online sales stop dead for no good reason and customers are calling to complain.
- Or your website has been defaced – with spam or even terrorist organization threats.
Any of these events can happen when your website isn’t being actively managed by someone good and responsive who uses due diligence.
Any and ALL of these things may happen when your website is hosted with a large company and isn’t being watched by a website manager. The web hosts do what they can to counter threats. They have thousands (in some cases millions) of different customers. Stuff happens anyway.
Note that if you asked us to build your site, it’s probable that you simply don’t have the in-house resources nor the time to deal with your website continually. You probably won’t know where to turn, nor who to ask to fix it, nor how to fix it.
There’s no shame in admitting this.
The Best Solution for Website Safety: Our Website Management Service.
Little Miami Web Works has a comprehensive website operating solution for your business: our active website management service.
What does “active” mean? It means that your website (and you) are taken care of. Think of it as a “concierge” service that is focused solely on the constant uptime and correct operation of your website. Exactly like a real life concierge, we take care of all problems silently, intelligently, and discreetly, without waiting to ask you.
Here’s what we’ll do under a website management contract:
- Keep you safe with ongoing updates of components like website software plugins that are continually updated by their authors.
- Keep your data safe with regular full backups of your site. Redundancy: we periodically download and keep your backups at our site.
- Hacking detection and response, and timely remediation of sites we manage in the highly unlikely event that your site is compromised. In other words we have recent backups of your current website and we will re-load the website seamlessly and without you even noticing in the event that your website ever goes down on our watch.
- Watch Google alerts to keep your site and domain from being de-listed. This means that Google thinks your site is spam and removes it from Google search results. This does happen as a by-product of hacked sites.
- Remind you of critical domain name and privacy renewals – or even renew on your behalf. Failure to renew your domain in a timely way means that your dot com name will probably be stolen and held for ransom by someone somewhere. It’s not considered a criminal act so neither courts nor police can get it back for you. Imagine having to print new marketing materials, business cards, or even replace signage. And media ad placements (yellow pages) will instantly be out of date. Don’t let it happen to you! Let us keep track of domain renewals for you.
Pricing begins at $40/month for “light” concierge service of simpler sites and includes our fast web hosting.
Ready to Get Started?
If you’re still with us you probably have questions. Get answers. Just send an email, use this contact form, or call us and leave a message with a good callback time.