Munklefish web development manchester, knows that the Internet can be a confusing place. So the following FAQ's answer the most common questions we receive regarding Web Design, development, Hosting and Search Engine Optimisation(S.E.O.).
This depends on how you are going to use it. If you are going to be telling people over the phone, choose one that is easy to say and spell out loud. Above all, we recommend one that is memorable, describes your business or services, and won't confuse potential clients.
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You can take payments online in a number of ways. The first is PayPal - this an inexpensive way to start taking payments quickly, especially if you don't have a merchant account. With PayPal, your visitors can pay you with a credit card or by sending a payment from their checking account (echeck).
PayPal provides a shopping cart and many other free services that are helpful to sites that are starting out. They charge 2.9% +15p per transaction with no start-up fees. The downsides are that PayPal is not a very customizable solution, and it can have a “start-up” feel. However, this is changing and many mainstream sites are now accepting PayPal as more and more people have PayPal accounts. PayPal is inexpensive both because there are no merchant account of payment gateway fees, but also because PayPal provides a very easy way to integrate their shopping cart into your site, which reduces development time.
A similar solution just for non-profits is Network for Good, which allows you to accept credit card donations on your site. They charge 3% of each transaction.
Another inexpensive option is a free solution called Mal's e-commerce. Mal's is a shopping cart system that is remotely hosted. With the free version, you can accept PayPal, offline payments like checks, and credit cards if you have your own way to charge them already. It will store the numbers for you to run offline. For a small month fee you can upgrade your cart so it can integrate with a number of popular payment gateways. There are other fees associated with payment gateways and merchant accounts that you would also be responsible for.
Finally, there is the option of creating a full e-commerce solution. This involves many different components - a merchant account from a bank, a payment gateway service that allows you to accept payments into your merchant account from your website (this is often bundled with the merchant account), a shopping cart or payment script that integrates with your payment gateway, and certain elements of the server environment like having an SSL certificate and a static IP. There are some shopping carts that are available as pre-packaged scripts such as ClearCart that can be customized for your situation, or a custom payment script can be developed that exactly matches your needs. Full e-commerce is much more expensive and time-consuming to develop than PayPal or Mal's, but it can be integrated into your site for a truly seamless payment experience. It can also save you money in the long run if you are doing a high volume of sales.
A static site is one that is written in HTML only. Each page is a separate document and there is no database that it draws data/textual content from. This means that the only way to edit the site is to go into each page and edit the HTML - so you'd either have to do it yourself using a webpage editor like FrontPage or pay a wed development company such as Munklefish to go in and edit the site each time you wanted something changed.
Contrastingly a dynamic site is one written using more complex code, which results in greater scalability. For instance, Munklefish can develop an area of your website where you can log in and change various parts of the site, such as adding information or products. This is because each page is constructed based on the information in a database, and the information in that database can be changed via another interface.
Dynamic sites can reduce ongoing maintenance costs if you don't want to change things yourself with a webpage editor or with the HTML. They usually cost more to develop, as they require more complex coding and a content management utility needs to be developed to help you manage your website information.
Another benefit of dynamic sites is that they allow you to change only the content of the site and not the design, so you will not be able to accidentally break the visual style of the site. They have other benefits when sites start to get very large, as they make data management much more efficient allowing your site to grow easily.
Many clients do a combination, having some dynamic areas such as a product catalog where they have to change information or pictures regularly, and leave other pages such as contact information as static pages.
Search engines find and rank new sites by following (spidering) links on other websites. However if you dont have many inbound links or these are not optimised links, you will struggle to get your site noticed by the search engines.
Munklefish are able to submit your website to approximately 95 major search engines and upto 400+ subsiduary search engines using specialist indusry leading software. By doing so we are able to alert the search engines to the presence of your website and even get you higher up the queue of sites waiting to be indexed.
For more information on submitting your site and how to promote your site through search engines, contact us about our Search Engine Optimisation(S.E.O.) services.
Search engine positioning is a long-term strategy, and there are no quick-fix solutions in this area. To be really effective with search engine marketing, your site needs to be focused around the right keywords and keyword phrases. If you want to boost your traffic quickly, I would suggest checking out Google AdWords or other paid advertisement options which we can manage for you.
That said, these are the summarised steps that we follow when performing S.E.O. for our clients:
1. We work with you to determine the optimum keyword(s) phrase for your website / industry / product(s). Likewise we then determine the primary search engine to target as Google is not always the best choice. This ensures that your website will be targetted to the optimal market share via the search engine searches.
2. Using our industry leading specilist search engine optimisation software we analyse the top 10 ranking sites listed in the primary search engine using the keyword(s) phrase identified in stage 1. This generates a very detailed analysis report, highlighting the hard fact with regards to what is currently required to rank your site highly.
3. The report is then used as the basis to optimise your site via a number of methods such as adding s.e.o. specific html data tags, optimising page content, keywords, page titles, image tags, html attributes and where necessaty component names. Furthermore we are able to actively seek and implement important peer based inbound optimised hyperlinks.
4. Once these changes have been implemented, we upload the changes to your web-site, before performing the whole process again. This allows us to compare the top ranked sites to your own, and the changes we have made. As a result we are able to perform a fine tuning process for maximum results.
5. Finally we submit your website to upto 95 search engines and additional search directories(optional) which feed a total of 405 affiliated search engines. This ensures that the search engines are aware of your website, and index(review and list) it as soon as possible.