| How
does the design process work? |
| Just send us
whatever you currently use for promoting your firm (if
anything) - brochure, logo, bios, firm profile, services,
etc. You can send it via postal mail, email or
fax. If there is a particular site style you like,
direct us to examples on the web (they do not have to be
sites we designed). Many of our clients have very
particular ideas about what they want and others simply send
us their list of services and let our designers take it from
there. We work well in either situation.
|
|
How
long does it take?
|
| We will typically
have a construction page up for you to review within 2 to 3
weeks (or less) after receiving your information. If
you are anxious to get a site designed faster than that, we
have obliged firms many times in the past. Once you
have reviewed the construction page, we will usually finish
the site within a week.
|
| What
if we don't like the site you design for us? |
| We will scrap it
and start over! As experienced designers, we know that
site style is entirely subject to personal taste. We
rarely destroy a site we have designed - we typically try it
out on a different firm because we know that if we like it,
someone else will like it as well. We will tell you
however, that since we concentrate exclusively on CPA firms
and know the industry well, our success rate at
"getting it right the first time" is around 80%!
|
| We
already have our domain (ourfirm.com) registered with our
local ISP and do not want to change our e-mail. |
| That's not a
problem. Most of our clients keep their domain with
their local ISP just for that same reason. You
can keep your domain on a local server, yet have a website
using that domain on any server around the world. We
will handle that for you as part of the setup. Your
e-mail service will never change or be interrupted.
|
| If
we go with your full service ($150 per month), how does the
"free half-hour" work for website changes? |
| Anytime you want
us to make a change to your site (adding an in-house
newsletter, adding or subtracting new employees, services,
etc), simply e-mail us what you want done. Some
clients edit their own pages and e-mail them to us while
others simply e-mail them in a word document. If you
send us your changes in electronic format (word processing
document for example), we can generally get them online in
well under your half-hour time frame. If you have
extensive changes that require more than one-half hour, we
charge $50 per hour and will give you an estimate upon
request.
|
| We
like your newsletter and other content, but we also like the
website we already have or we have a client that designs
websites. Can we still use your service? |
| Absolutely.
We can either transfer your current (or future) website to
our server or you can leave your site where it is and simply
link in to a directory we will set up for you on our server
for your specially designed content pages. If you are
paying another company a monthly fee for hosting your site,
however, we would recommend moving it to our server
since our monthly fee is the same regardless of whether we
host your homepages or not.
|
| We
design and maintain our own website in-house. Is there
a way we can use your content? |
| Yes. We
have several clients that merely download our content pages
(calculators, articles, links and database pages) from a
directory we give them on our server. They then take
those pages and change them any way they like to match their
site.
|
| If
we maintain a site on your server, will we have access to
make our own changes anytime we want? |
| Yes. You
can use our Website Manager program via the internet to
download and upload pages, graphics, etc to your website 24
hours a day.
|
| Is
there a long-term contract we would have to sign? |
| Since we are an
internet "management" firm for CPAs, we tend to
discount our design and setup charges in order to encourage
monthly management business. For that reason, we do
require a one-year service agreement. After 12
months, however, you are free to drop our service at any
time.
|
| If
you design our site and we later drop your service, can we
move the pages you designed for us to another provider? |
| Any pages or
artwork that we design "exclusively" for your firm
will be owned by your firm and can be moved to another
provider. Obviously, any content pages such as
newsletters, articles, calculators, databases, etc. are
copyrighted by us and should not be copied from our servers.
|
| We
currently have our own newsletter we send to clients.
Can we add it to our site and, if so, at what price? |
| Not only can you
add it to your site, but we encourage you to make your site
as interesting and informative as possible to your clients.
As long as you send the newsletter to us in electronic
format (word processor document, etc.), it should take us
less than half an hour to load it to your site and create a
link. If you subscribe to our full-service, that
half-hour is free. If you are an intermediate level
subscriber, our minimum charge for a change or
addition is $25 which almost always covers additions or
changes of that type.
|
| If
we subscribe to your website service, can we reprint your
articles in our local newsletter? |
| Absolutely!
You "own" the rights to those articles in your
market area, so feel free to reprint them in your local
newsletter if you wish. That helps make our service
even more economical for your firm if you currently use
another newsletter service or take up valuable employee
chargeable time presently on writing newsletter articles. |
|
