FAQs

There are two components to hosting a website: The hosting fee and the domain name fee.

Hosting is essentially server rental. You pay for space on a shared server to store your web files and server them to users online. We offer two options. You can pay for a year of service in a single payment or you can pay monthly. The monthly option costs more per month but includes any site changes you request. There are no other fees. The yearly option costs less but any site changes will be billed additionally.

You will also want to register a domain name for your website. A domain name is what you type into your browser to view a site such as www.google.com or www.wmcodesign.com. The cost to register a domain name is $20 per year.

Please visit our Web Hosting page for more details on our hosting packages.

WMdevelopment designs custom websites. Your site will not be a cookie cutter site unless that is what you want. We are concerned with giving you a great design while keeping costs low. We charge by the hour which we fell is fair for everyone.

A basic informational sites will fall in the range of $350 - $500. In Web 2.0, most clients need more than just information. They want to be able to administer the site themselves and change content easily. Additional features can include interactive pages, site search, content management systems, Ecommerce and anything you can think of. We want to put your ideas on the web. We want you to be happy with your site. We try to do all that you ask but not for more than you can afford.

Yes. Our hosting packages include a site builder with which you can make your own site. Or you can make a site on your own software and upload it to the server. Please consult with us if you want to use your own software so that we can know if special setting need to be made for your site.

State of the art software can make it very easy to get your site on the web, but there are a lot of specialized tasks that can make your site load faster and be more search friendly with major search engines. Please consult with us to see how we can take your site to the next level.

Search engines use programs called robots or spiders that scour the web "crawling" pages, indexing the text and following any links they find to other sites. If someone has linked to you, they will eventually find you. You can also submit your site to many search engines to request that they "crawl" your site. We include submission to 3 major search engines( Google, Yahoo!, and MSN ) with our development fee. More extensive search engine submission is available. Let us know if you would like us to submit your site to additional directories and local vertical sites that may index your site for more local traffic.

It is very difficult now to get to the top with organic results only. If you are on the first page of a major search engine, consider yourself extremely lucky. Some things that help your site climb the search results are unique content, frequently updated information, inbound links, high traffic and quality, relevent keywords.

The alternative to trying to work your way up the organic results is to pay for a sponsored listing. Typically you bid on keywords and when a user types those keywords into the search page, you link will appear in the desinated sponsored links area, usually on the top or the right column of the page. Depending on the level of competition for your keywords, your price will vary, but you can set up a monthly budget to cap your expenses for the month.

There is no set time. Sometimes it is very fast but typically we find it may take up to six months before you will see any results for your site on many search engines. Some directories add sites only upon human review and acceptance after they determine that your content is worthy of inclusion in their directory.

That depends. With the tremendous growth of the internet, it has become much more difficult to become a player than in the early years. You cannot depend on search engine results alone to be "seen". If you have a niche market, you will see more results than businesses that are plentiful and highly competitive. Just like any other venue, you will need to have a way to get your website publicized for the region that you want to cover. Your website however is almost a necessity in these times to let people know that you are seriously in business.

The important points of initial planning are:

1. Plan what content you want to display and how you want it organized. What is unique that you want people to know.
2. Type out the text and ideas you have for each "page" or segment of your site so those ideas are easy to visualize and convey to the designer.
3. Plan what colors you like so your site is "you".
4. Consult with a developer to see if they can put your ideas on "paper"
5. Develop 4 or 5 ideas for a domain name for your site as many are now taken. You will need to have several that you are OK with so that one might be available. Do not try to see if a domain is available on your own as there are people out there who pounce on domain checks and will register your domain if you do not register it right away.

Once you have these things planned, you have a basic skeleton to work with and can make changes as you see your site come together.

You have a couple of choices to do you own maintenance.

1. We can build your site with an administration module that is easy to navigate. This will likely cost a little more than other options but is the easiest for you.
2. We can build you a CMS site. CMS stands for Content Management System. We use Joomla!. It is a very well done CMS but it can be intimidating for a novice at the computer. It can even be intimidating for someone who is fairly adept. You can learn it if you are adventuresome and spend a little time working with it.
3. We can teach you how to edit and upload files the old fashioned way. This is probably the lowest cost option if you are quick to learn. The bad part about this is that you may forget how to do it if you do not do it much and it is much more likely that you will make mistakes and mess something up.

No. We offer maintenance services. Here again we will only charge you by the changes you authorize. If you do monthly updates it will cost less than if we do daily updates. If you require updates on demand, we can build a custom CMS for your site.

Yes, we will train you to administer your site whichever option you choose. Please see our extra services area for pricing.

We have found that this is best left to people that know what they are doing. Things have changed since the internet began and now unscrupulous people are monitoring domain checks and try to pirate them so they can resell it to you at a higher cost. If you still want to check a domain, the best place to go is to the internic.org site and go the their who is section.

Yes. We can do a transfer if you would like to switch to our hosting. Ideally, you should try to time your transfer so that your hosting agreement expires at the time we are ready with your new site so that they can be renewed on the same schedule which makes it easier to manage.

Yes. Our lowest cost hosting plan allows you to have up to 3 domain names pointing to your site or to different parts of your site. If you need more information, please contact us.

Absolutely not. This company tries to trick people into sending them money. If you ae hosting with us, do not respond to any letters or phone calls from anyone else. We will notify you when your domain needs to be renewed. We have had some customers that did not let us know that this happened until they had already sent in money. Some customers had asked us what to do before they responded. If in doubt, ask.