What? No website? That's like selling Cola without a can, gasoline without the ridiculous prices, a Happy Meal without the toy, an item off of TV and not getting those really irritating styrofoam popcorn pieces that end up all over your house. Wait, scratch that last one. We lost our focus. What we're trying to say here is that not having a website can really hurt your ability to get across the point you're trying to make! Although you may not like the idea, the web has taken over a big part of how the salesperson and customer interact. A lot of people prefer to handle all aspects of a sale online, and when that's not possible, they visit websites to get information pertaining to your business which saves you time, and saves the customer trouble. So whether it's a static web page intended as an online informational avenue, or an actual online salesplace, your website can work harder for you than any employee ever would(unless you hire your mother. She will walk to the ends of earth for you, and we stop somewhere around Albequerque, New Mexico. At least we're big enough to admit this.). Granted, we're a little bit biased, but if you look at your competitors, we're confident that you'll find the vast majority of them have a web presence. We've talked about why you need one, now lets visit a minute on the topic of why you need us: We're website designers that also provide hosting services, not a hosting company that also designs. While this may sound like semantics, there's a big difference. Hosting companies and ISP's make the majority of their income providing the space for your website. The actual site design plays second fiddle to the hosting, but they're smart enough to realise that they can sell a lot more hosting since the simple fact of the matter is designers are hard to come by. So you purchase some hosting space from them and they design a page for you. When you get to see that page, you'll usually experience the feeling somewhat like a helium baloon slowly losing it's contents. What we mean to say is that you'll start noticing that it looks like every other page that you've seen. Why is that? The reason is that to make websites fast and to maximise the profit margin, many designers will use a website editor that creates websites from templates. The resulting websites look like... well, like templates. Don't worry though. You'll usually spend premium dollar on these sites, so even if you can't say you have a top notch website, you can say that you spent top dollar. Trust us when we say that a top notch site is better to have. So, what are your options? You can use your child's college fund and go with a big time design firm, but even after you fork over obscene amounts of dough, you still have to manage to get your point across in regards to what you want your site to be like. Sounds easy at first, but just for fun, let's throw in the fact that you might get a different person to talk to each time, with your information being held in the computer to reference, and when you do get to talk to someone, they're juggling you with 12 other clients(PROFIT!). Or you could go with the modest sized design company(we fall into that group, and on a completely unrelated note, it's our favorite group!). Sounds easy enough to pick a name from the vast sea of potential designers, but keep in mind that many of these also use editors that will make your site look like hundreds of thousands of others on the web, or it may end up looking like you tossed your four year old in front of the computer and didn't let them eat lunch until they had designed your site for you. You know what? We don't have all the answers. We can't even tell you how they get the pimento in the middle of the olive(although we're pretty sure it has to have something to do with large amounts of compressed air). We can only tell you that when you're looking at prospective designers, you should look at a large sampling of their work. Make sure that they can design a nice looking site, but also that they have the ability to be diverse. You may not want a site in the same format as the one they designed for the lady in Kalamazoo that sells baby booties made from human hair on eBay. Make sure they have the ability to tailor the site to your tastes, and what you feel your site should look like. It seems like a bunch to think about, doesn't it? Well, truth be told, there's a lot of good designers on the web. Although if asked in front of a jury, we would staunchly deny making this statement, we can say that there are a lot of designers on the web that can take us to school and teach us a thing or two about designing web sites. But we're good. We also take customer appreciation to a ridiculously new level. On top of all of this, we're really nice people, and we want you to be happy with the product that we provide to you. Even if it weren't for the most altruistic of reasons, we want you to tell other people how happy you are with our service. We don't believe in herding clients into a design they don't want just to get them out the door. We take each project and we obsess about it until the client is deliriously happy. If we can't make them deleriously happy (some people seem to lack that emotion), then we'll settle for enthusiastically satisfied. In short, we're not happy until you're happy. If you're one of those people who are never happy, we try really hard to figure that out early on in our relationship. If it becomes painfully clear that you belong to the tribe of the eternally dissatisfied, we're not too proud to cry uncle. We know these people exist, and we don't want to waste their time any more than we want to waste ours. If you do decide to give us a try, we can promise you that we'll try our hardest to give you what you want. We know that there's thousands of designers out there, and like we said before, a lot of them are good. We believe that we have balanced the quality and price much better than the majority of our competitors, however. If you'd like to ask us about our design services, please contact us, and we'll be pleased to discuss your project. Or you could have your Uncle Ned design your site, but we've seen his work, and can promise you that you're going to get some complaints on his choice in background colors. Need information on SEO optimization? Click here Thanks, Schwim.net Hosting & Design & Pixelicious