Services: Web Design, Search Engine Marketing, Optimization & Promotion and Web Hosting
Cost-effective web site solutions
We are business people as well as designers, and recognize that small and medium size businesses want to keep their costs sensible and generate a positive return from their web design projects. Art on the Web provides this. We run a tight ship, keeping our overheads low and giving our clients all of our accumulated web site and business knowledge to help them be successful.
The only way we can be successful is if our clients are successful.
Art on the Web's bespoke web sites cost between $2500 and $15000, depending on the requirements involved. A database-driven web site with an inventory management system generally costs in the $4000 to $5000 range depending largely on whether a criteria-based search facility is involved.
Art on the Web has experience in many business sectors
Our company has worked with clients in a number of businesses, including:
- Fine Art & Antiques Dealers
- Museums
- Professional Organizations
- Artists
- Real Estate Agencies
- Lawyers
- Investment Boutiques
- Design Companies
- Oriental Rug Importers
- Construction Cost & Project Management
- Literary Agents
- Job Placement Agencies
- Food Service Franchises
- Wine Sellers
- Record Producers
- Travel Consultants
- Oil & Gas Industry
Experienced in developing service or product-based web sites
We offer the web design and coding skills essential to building a site specific to your requirements, whether they be service or product-based. Our customized content management systems allow you to add, edit or delete news stories, press reports, inventory items, prices, client contact information, newsletter creation and mailings and much more.
Art on the Web has worked with over 100 clients, providing brochure-based web sites, service-oriented web sites and full ecommerce web sites. Our ecommerce sites may include the shopping cart, check out facilities, optional checkout with PayPal, email notification, customer profiles and purchase histories, management reports on sales and transactions, inventory management and tracking, automatic shipping calculations via FedEx or UPS and the ability to offer discounts, specials and coupons.
Modern-looking, search engine friendly web sites with CSS
Our design philosophy is to build clean, modern-looking sites that are user-friendly and search-engine friendly. In order to achieve these goals, we use cascading style sheets (CSS). Utilizing CSS avoids the code bloat which obscures the essential content on a web page and can make it search-engine 'unfriendly'. It also makes updating the look of a site faster and more efficient and usually results in a site that has a more consistent and professional appearance throughout.
Our highest priority is to deliver user-friendly web sites. Consequently we spend a lot of time solving the challenge of providing clear and logical navigational elements and structure to your site layout.
Database-driven sites for cost-effective and efficient site management
Web sites created by Art on the Web are programmed using ASP coding to pull context-sensitive information dynamically from relational databases. Putting the content into database tables enables the site to be designed and updated (via content-management tools) more efficiently and cost-effectively than a static web site, and always maintain a highly important consistency in appearance.
Customized hosting solutions for our clients
Due to the highly customized nature of the web sites we create for our customers, Art on the Web has its own state-of-the art Windows 2003 servers to host these domains. These custom-tailored web sites require server upload and image resize components to assist with the upload of documents, images and any necessary scaling of these images. Each web site also requires read & write permissions to be set up on selected folders and for the database. Additionally, our web sites require Windows servers in order to process the ASP code embedded in the web documents and as a rule, cannot be hosted on Apache or Unix servers.
There are few mass-market hosts who will allow clients to make these custom configurations and add the software required for content management, so providing a hosting solution for our customers was a natural step.
Fast & efficient servers
Our servers are limited to 75 web sites maximum per server in order to insure that each web site responds quickly when a page is requested. Also, as our clients are generally small businesses, consulting boutiques and niche retailers, the cumulative amount of traffic channeled to each server is low, again insuring that our servers are lightening fast.
Commercial, budget-priced web hosting companies often host 1000's of web sites on the same server, relying on the fact that few of the clients will have heavily trafficked sites and that few of the domains will use their entire allotment of space. Budget web hosting companies will sell 100gb of web space on a 36gb server, betting that the domains will not utilize their full hard-drive allocation. We do not engage in this smoke and mirrors strategy.
Web hosting for sites we did not design and build
Art on the Web will work with companies that wish to have a low-key and personalized web hosting solution. We welcome clients who call their current hosts for support and get recorded messages and long hold times, or who find that their web sites are 'temporarily unavailable'. You will get personal service for all of your support needs. Our servers are operational 99.9% of the time. We can also work with you if you need specific software installed on the server for your web site to function properly such as a secure server certification or a special mail server component.
How much does it cost?
Web hosting packages are billed annually. The cost is a function of several factors:
- Server space allocation
- Anticipated bandwith usage
- Degree of custom configuration
- Level of direct ftp access required
- Number of email accounts
- Level of support
Our most basic hosting package starts out at $240 per annum while our most premium package is $960 per annum. Most virtual server packages, however, cost somewhere in the middle range of these two figures.
Art on the Web understands our clients' needs to be found through search engines
When Art on the Web designs a web site, in the forefront of our planning is an understanding that our clients are establishing an internet presence because they generally hope to gain new customers through organic search engine visibility. Consequently, we try to avoid the pitfalls that hurt a web site's search engine rankings such as splash pages, complex javascript navigation and rollovers, extensive table-based design, non-logically ordered html markup tags, the use of framesets and flash introductions.
We also try to structure a site so that it is set up to be as search engine friendly or optimized as possible given the specific requirements of our customers and the content they provide to us. We will make them aware when their wishes regarding certain content and visual aspects of the site might contradict their search engine ranking aspirations.
Doing these things as an integral part of our design and coding process, we often find that in the course of time, a significant number of Art on the Web designed web sites achieve top ten or top twenty status for some of the phrases that most describe the businesses involved.
Search engine optimization and marketeting beyond the initial design parameters
With the above comments in mind, some key words and phrases are highly competitive and it takes dedicated and specialized work to make a client's web site show up in the top 10, 20 or 30 sites for these targeted phrases.
Art on the Web offers additional search engine optimization and promotion services for clients who are really focused on trying to generate more web site traffic through organic and pay-per-click search engine searches and are willing to commit a budget to achieve this.
We can undertake the following search engine marketing services for a client:
- Periodic submissions of the web site to the major search engines
- Building the number of incoming links to the web site
- Page code modifications to improve the relevancy for targeted keywords of any page
- Selecting the best keywords to target for the client's business sector
- Building dedicated new pages into the web site in order to improve search engine visibility and raise search engine rankings for challenging key phrases
- Periodic ranking reports to analyse changes in the web site's search engine positions over time
- Web site traffic reports to understand the volume and nature of users visits to the web site and how they arrive at the site
- Assistance with pay-per-click advertising - the set-up, budget management, results analysis, keyword targeting
