Rates
The Site Smiths strives to be an affordable option for business owners looking for a custom website with a fully editable back end that performs well on the search engines. For businesses on a shoe string budget that just need a website they can direct visitors to, we suggest the brochure website. While not built to perform well on search engines, the brochure sites offer a way to communicate with your audience.
Each website is different, but the information below will give you a general idea of our costs.
Brochure Website - $450:
- Template driven with graphical modification to be truly unique
- Quick Contact Form
- Up to 7 pages of content
Search Optimized Custom Website - $1450:
- Fully Custom Designed Website - no templates, a full on custom
- Content Management System - enables client to add, edit and delete any page of the website
- Search Engine Optimized Architecture
- Up to 50 pages of standard site content (content provided by client)
- Blog with unlimited categories and articles
- Training on how to add content, links, and blog entries
- Quick Contact form
- Up to 2 in depth online forms allowing site user to submit information
- Syndication capabilities of all site content
- Search box
- Cross platform functionality for Internet Explorer (version 6 and above), Firefox and Safari
- Domain Name
- Hosting of web site for 1 year
- Video capable - use content from You Tube, Google Video, or create your own
The Site Smiths offers the following site additions at extra cost:
- Flash design and animation - Light animation is generally around $300- $500, and generally what we consider “light animation” fulfills what our clients are looking for. Full custom flash websites are around $2,000
- Online Calendar - managed by the same Content Management system your site is built on - $250
- Email Newsletter design and maintenance - $400
- E-Commerce functionality - There are several factors that go into an e-commerce website. At the very basic level- to sell a few products and use Paypal as the processor, prices are $300 for set up and $50 per product page. To build a full e-commerce shop, complete with a product and customer tracking back end, automatic shipping calculation and a world of other very high level features, prices are $2850. Generally, the price will end up around $3200 to get ever aspect of the site fully customized to what the client needs. Hundreds of products in multiple categories can be sold on these full fledged e-commerce websites.
Web Master Service - Website Maintenance
Most businesses will need a hand in managing their website. Though most web site changes can be accomplished by our clients through our back end, certain issues like graphic changes, additions or changes to online forms, main navigation changes, and general back up and security will need to be addressed. Additionally, since clients are indeed able to affect their own website, sometimes mistakes are made that need professional fixing.
Our Web Master service is available at $125 per month under a 12 month contract.
For clients not under contract, maintenance and web site fixes are billed at the hourly rate of $65 with a three hour minimum.
Online Marketing Packages
The majority of our clients are interested in actively promoting their website to attract as many clients as possible. There are 3 main components to gaining high rankings in the search engines which leads to website visitors. Search Engine Optimized architecture (standard with our SEO’d Custom websites), SEO’d content, and links pointed to your website.
Our monthly marketing packages begin with defining key words and phrases that target what your potential customers may be using to find a company that sells your product or offers your service. For example, an immigration attorney located in Los Angeles will want to rank high on the search engines for Los Angeles Criminal Attorney.
Using that list of keywords and phrases, The Site Smiths will aggressively find link partners willing to place a link to your website on their own site. This is a manual process of finding potential link partners for your site, and suggesting a link trade agreement with them. Once a link is agreed upon, your site will host a link to that website, and they will do the same. The more links that point to your website, which are created in a very specific manner designed by our company, the higher your rankings will be on the search engines.
An additional avenue that will bring your website traffic from potential clients is the creation of a Search Engine Optimized HTML ad that will be published every eight days on several online classified sites. These include Craigslist, OLX, Backpage and Kijiji. Most advertisers on these websites are missing out on huge benefits that can be received by creating a well written and coded HTML ad. These ads not only bring actual potential clients that see your advertisement, but rank extremely well on search engines them selves when constructed properly.
Properly constructed content on your website is absolutely crucial in gaining high ranking on search engines. Each page of your website must be highly targeted to attract search engines. Two factors are key in optimizing your content. The first is to have the architecture, or code, of your site be built in a manner in which every opportunity to add key words and phrases is used. This feature is standard in our SEO’d custom websites. The second factor is to have the actual content of the page written to include your keywords and variations of those keywords all throughout it. The key words should be presented in several different ways, including bolding some of them, using standard HTML tags like <H1> and <H2> to make that particular key word larger than the rest of the page’s text, and linking some of them to other areas of your site.
As a client of our monthly marketing package, The Site Smiths will constantly optimize your site’s pages and add one to two pages of fresh content as needed, based on the key words and phrases identified in the beginning of the project.
Your site needs to have a well thought out internal link structure. This is accomplished by creating links to other areas of your site within the body of each page. While your navigation exists to provide a standard menu that your clients will use to visit each portion of your site, the links within the body of the page will keep your user continuously jumping to other pages, not to mention that links within the body of your page are treated with greater relevance than standard menu links. These links do not by any means replace your standard navigation, but extend the linking of your site.
There are literally hundreds of things that can be done to increase your search engine rankings. We use several tactics, and our arsenal of techniques grows all the time.By having The Site Smiths actively marketing your website on a weekly basis, incredible exposure can be accomplished.
Our online marketing packages start at $250 per month. We have several clients getting first page results in highly competitive markets at this price point.