Erich Stauffer

Category: Web Design

  • What Are Our Basic Costs for Web Design and Maintenance?

    Our web sites can range from $600 to $3500 but I doubt you’ll want either of those. Here is what you’ll get for $1200 during our Spring Special (Ends April 21):

    • A custom-designed website co-designed by you to match your company, your brand, and your tastes
    • The training and ability to edit your website content whenever you want
    • In-person meetings, phone and email support
    • ‘One-off’ email setup or email management for your whole company via Google Apps
    • Logo and brand editing with options for logo creation and marketing material creation
    • Acquisition or transfer of your domain (your website address)
    • A Facebook page and Twitter account setup and integration (if not done already)
    • RSS syndication feed from your website
    • A marketing partner that can offer advice on web and traditional based advertising

    After the website is complete, changes are free for 30 days, after which you have the option of signing up for a monthly maintenance package than can include your mix of changes to the website or SEO/marketing of your business. Packages range from $200 to $800 a month. $200 gets you Facebook and Twitter updates and backlinks as well as minor changes to your website such as text changes. $800 is ‘outsourced’ marketing where we actually write copy for you on your site and others in order to create more backlinks and take up more search engine positions to cast a wider net for search engine traffic. We’ll also be available to take calls from marketing or advertising vendors such as AT&T. You’ll be able to forward them to us to find out the details and negotiate any deals that we may feel are beneficial to you.

  • Self-Hosting Tips for WordPress

    Thinking about hosting your own WordPress domain on your own server? Here are a few things to consider.

    If you use our hosting you are using a linux-based server running WordPress on a SQL database. If you hosted it yourself you would still have to have a linux server with access to a SQL database unless you wanted to convert the site to flat files that could run on any type of server. WordPress is a content management system originally developed for blogging that allows a user to login and make changes to their site, add, or remove content. Flat files are the old way of displaying a web site, which requires manually editing a file, then uploading it via FTP.

    The domain is hosted and registered with 1and1, the largest hosting company in the world. The actual server is in a data center in Kansas City, Kansas. It gets regular maintenance, backups, and has redundant power and cooling systems. We are happy to facilitate the change of your domain, but you should know the requirements of the website first.

    My recommendation is for you or your new IT department to get full FTP and WordPress access to the current account as a first measure followed by signing up for their own hosting account with 1and1, BlueHost, or HostGator (which all support WordPress) before buying and setting up your own Linux server with access to a SQL database. There are other security concerns too to take in consideration when you invite the public into your private network. A capable IT technician should be able to build adequate ‘DMZ’s and firewalls, but the safest, easiest, and cheapest route is to have your own hosting account.

    What we offer is management of a hosted account. This includes keeping WordPresss’ software up to date, checking to make sure your plugins (WordPress programs like web forms) still work properly, checking for uptime, and sending monthly reports. This also allows us to make minor changes to text when you need it. We charge $125 a year for this service. Compare that to buying your own hosting account for $60 a year then having to do all of the maintenance and reporting yourself. If you have the trained manpower and it makes sense to go that route, we will provide the files to do so and unlock your domain when ready. Your IT department would be responsible for pulling the domain over, setting up the SQL database, installing WordPress, and installing the theme. Any assistance to these items would be billed at our $65 an hour rate.

    Just let us know what you decide to do. We are here to help.

  • Erich Stauffer Web Services

    Telablue has merged with Erich Stauffer, Inc., an Indianapolis Technology Consulting company and will continue to provide web design, development, and hosting services in addition to SEO. Erich Stauffer also offers search engine optimization (SEO), social media marketing, and online advertising. We also do computer services like network management and mobile phone support. Browse all of these services at our services page or contact us for more information by calling 317-572-7521 where we will be happy to discuss these changes with you.

  • Purple is the New Black

    In art class they will teach you to never use black as black rarely occurs in nature. Instead, when a dark hue is needed, purple is used. Even in web design, a dark gray is used instead of black as black itself is harsh and unprofessional.

    What is Black?

    If black is never ‘black’ then what is black? Black is brown, gray, and purple. It’s dark and contrasting. It’s bold, but much the same way any solid color is when used appropriately. But how often are solid colors found in nature? Almost all colors are mixed and changing, just like the definition of ‘black’.

    Today I saw two men wearing purple shirts. One man was my elder and the other my younger. I didn’t like either application of the color and wondered if my age or my micro-generation was somehow biased against it as it reminded me of purple silk shirts from the early 90’s – but those days are over. Aren’t they? Or is purple the new black?

  • Tablet PCs and Their Effect on Web Design

    2011 is supposed to be ‘the year of the tablet’ and while growth has exploded since 2009 it hasn’t really affected web design, but all that may soon change.

    imageIn the same way ebook readers are changing the way books are produced, tablet PCs may change the way web site content is produced. For example, how would a web site be designed differently if it were meant to be touched instead of clicked? We already have separate domains and style sheets for mobile phones, why not for other mobile devices?

    Web analytics are currently smart enough to detect browser types, but how will we detect tablet PCs. There are so many different types that we need a tablet comparison just to know what tablet runs what operating system for compatibility!

    Maybe it won’t be a problem. Hopefully it will all work out, but as technology progresses, so must web design.

  • Don’t Forget About Weebly

    Webories, a web directories web site, has a post entitled “Top 5 Hosted Micro-Blogging Publishing Services”, but one web site they missed was Weebly.

    Weebly is a San Francisco, California based company that was founded in 2006 with the mission to help people put their information online quickly and easily. It now enables 3 million people to easily create personal sites and blogs or establish web presences for businesses, weddings, classrooms, churches, or artistic portfolios – just to name a few examples.

    In early 2007, the Weebly founding team joined a seed funding program called Y Combinator and began working full-time to make the Weebly service spectacular. Weebly was named one of TIME’s 50 Best Websites of 2007 under Web Services, and they have continued to improve Weebly’s feature set and ease of use ever since.

    Amescreative says, “Weebly is in a class by itself in many ways since it allows you to build a true website, and not just a blog, but it’s drag and drop interface can be confusing and frustrating for some. It however offers a lot of customization options if you are a programmer or going to use one to customize your site,” and goes on to compare with Tumblr, which was mentioned by Webories, “Tumblr offers a good mix with extreme ease of use for novices along with easy customization options for programmers or designers looking at it for the first time. Tumblr’s balance between these two important aspects are what make me recommend it as the best solution in most instances. If you want a more complete site, go with Weebly, and if you want to do it all yourself as a novice WordPress might be a good choice, but Tumblr is easier to use that WordPress in my opinion and while not doing everything that Weebly does, gets close.”

  • Blogtrepreneurs Blogging for Profit

    The Internet is a great unsettled land not unlike the discovery of a new world – and entrepreneurs everywhere are taking notice

    Entrepreneurs who blog for profit are sometimes called Blogtrepreneurs. Whether they come from a business background, an Internet marketing background, web design background, or are still in high school, anyone who can identity a niche (read: need) can turn content creation into revenue creation. In fact, that is exactly what I do everyday whether I’m actively working on a blog (or mini-site) or not. That is because blogging for profit is like a fly wheel. It takes a lot of energy to get it going (finding a niche, an appropriate domain, adding content, and promoting), but once the fly wheel is going it takes little effort to keep it going and you are free to start a new fly wheel, or blog.

    Niches

    Niches are segments of a market and are generally well covered. Micro-niches are segments of a niche and are generally covered less. This is where blogtrepreneurs can add value to the market by helping people find answers to what they are seeking in a nook of a market segment. For example, digital cameras are a market. SLR cameras are a niche of digital cameras and NIKON SLR cameras are a micro-niche of SLR cameras. A site about NIKON SLR cameras could sell it promote or educate about the cameras themselves and about all of their accessories. I have a blog about family photography that talks about different digital cameras and techniques for taking family pictures, for example. Identifying a micro-niche is not easy, but there are many sites out there that can help you identity how to find a niche.

    Domains

    Once you have a niche picked out, its time to secure a domain. There are still good domains to be had, but everyday there are less and less as more people gobble up the remaining ones. In the same way there is only so much land, there are only so many words and combinations of words, which is what adds to domains value over time. When choosing a domain you should include your primary keywords if at all possible. If you don’t know what your primary keywords are for your niche, stop and find out. There are plenty of sites with advice on how to choose the right keywords, which you should use  in your domain. Domains can be registered at registers like GoDaddy.com, but also at hosts like HostGator, 1and1, and BlueHost. I can recommend any of these.

    Content

    Once you have your domain registered with hosting, you’ll want to start adding content. One of the easiest ways to do this is to setup WordPress on your server. BlueHost makes it easy with SimpleScripts, but you can install it manually almost as easy at 1and1 and others. Once WordPress is installed, you can start adding posts, but where will you get the content? Think of writing content like writing a research paper. You can’t copy works, but you can quote and reference. Ultimately you wafted to add commentary and value to the material without plagiarising. You won’t get an F, but Google may not rank your site if it contains duplicate content so write your own. For my nook covers site I pieced together facts around the web to create something whole and new and its paid off.

    Promotion

    Now that you’ve created your content its time to promote your site. Promotion starts from within and that means finding a WordPress theme that is SEO ready it making it so. I’m not going to go into SEO here, but there are lots of sites that explain all about search engine optimization. The next step is creating backlinks, which are links back to your site from other, preferably relevant, sites. Think of backlinks as votes that Google uses to decide who it should rank first for a given set of keywords. Find relevant sites to create backlinks on by commenting or by adding to a forum discussion for example.  I was able to greatly increase my ereader accessories traffic by adding a link to it in a forum about ereaders.

    So do you think you have what it takes to be a blogtrepreneur? Don’t wait. The longer you do the more you delay getting paid and risk losing out on the perfect domain. Want more? Check out my other blog on how to make money online.

  • Erich Stauffer Web Design

    Erich Stauffer WordPress Web Design and Development for Small Businesses in the Greater Indianapolis Area

    When our sales managers started to realize that what customers really cared about was the ability to control their own website, they realized that they were not just selling great looking web design and SEO services, but control and access to their websites, and the ability to change text or add pages as needed. From this point it was decided to be more transparent about the content management system (CMS) they were using to support their clients: WordPress.

    WordPress is an open source CMS, originally used as a blog publishing application powered by PHP and MySQL, but has since been expanded to be able to support almost any web site. It has many features including a plugin architecture and a templating system and is used by over 12% of the top 1 million websites.

    The most popular CMS in use today, WordPress was first released on May 27, 2003 and has since added features like integrated link management, a search engine-friendly permalink structure, the ability to assign nested, multiple categories to posts, and support for tagging. Finally, WordPress has a rich plugin architecture which allows users and developers like us to extend its functionality beyond the features that come as part of the base install.

    By embracing WordPress and having more upfront pricing, we think this greater transparency will lead to a better customer relationship over time. If you are interested in working with friendly, professional, and experienced WordPress developers, contact us today.

  • The First Day of the Rest of My Life

    While the title of this post sounds a little dramatic, today I did turn in a resignation letter to my day-time job.  The job was well paying and secure.  I had friends and freedom there, but it wasn’t what I was passionate about and the moment I thought I could get away to do what I was passionate away, I did.  It wasn’t an easy decision though.

    A week ago I asked God how I should be spending my time to create revenue.  I decided to fast for 7 nights, skipping supper each night to pray instead.  By the end of the week, my wife and I both came to the same conclusion.  It was time to leave.  After that, our ideas of how things should go slightly differ.  She wants me to spend some time looking for another job and I want to take care of my current customers and build my own business, but I have a feeling I’ll do a little bit of both.  I’ve already informed a couple of old jobs I had that I would be willing to work for them again when needed.

    My wife is pregnant with our fourth child.  We don’t yet know what the sex is or how many there might be or whether or not we’ll have insurance.  My hope is that the path God led us down includes provisions for all of that and as long as I continue to pray and follow that path.  I have goals and plans to focus on the Indianapolis web design business, Growmotion, and Cost Publishing, my blog network, while doing contract work for an Indianapolis computer repair firm and Watershawl [a web design and SEO company I ran from 2007 to 2012].

    I don’t know what the future holds, but I have just under four weeks left at my current job to start finding out.  I have to figure out how I’m going to structure my day working at home, how much time I’m going to spend with my family playing, teaching, and eating, and how much time I’m going to spend resting and reading.  There are a lot of unknowns, but one thing is for sure, today is the first day of the rest of my life, but then again, every day is.