Giving you and your business the internet presence it deserves at a price you can afford!

Auto Update Dynamic Sites (without e-commerce) for Unfinished Furniture Stores - coming Feb 2007.

“Providing you the internet presence you deserve at a price you can afford! We have ability, we know the industry so we make it easy for you, and most importantly, we care that you do well.”

This page is specific to the unfinished furniture industry. If you have other web design needs, click here .

If you would like a more custom look, we can do that for you too. The following are examples of different kinds of Custom Sites we have the capability of creating:

www.timothydoyle.net (a “graphic heavy” site, very custom)
www.gelcowoodcraft.com (custom ecommerce dynamic site)
Your new web site will be built in 3 basic pieces, and at the end of the process, all the pieces are put together just like a puzzle. One step is to collect all of your image files for the items you wish to display on the web, and start optimizing them for the web, and creating a large copy of each photo and a thumbnail copy. Each image must be named in a specific fashion to match the database. Another step is to start building your database of information about each inventory in an excel format, with all of the pertinent information about each piece of merchandise. And third, we begin the design look of your site – the colors, the page content, the buttons, and navigation structure. We work on all of these items simultaneously, with the tasks being handled by different people on our staff.

Time line: approximately 3-6 months. Influences on this timeline are our current schedule of work at the time the deposit is made, how many inventory items you require, and how complex and customized you want the site to be.

Cost: We charge $59.00 per hour. We can give you a close estimate after a short phone interview - much of the cost will depend on how many inventory items you wish to carry. Just like building a new home, the less time spent with changes and the more organized the format of the information you give us, the less your site will cost. We will counsel you on different options as the need arises. Ongoing costs would include changes to the site, hosting, site submission, directory advertising, and “bid for click” positions. A $2500 deposit is required to begin the actual construction of the site. When that credit is used, you will be billed hourly on a monthly basis.

It is helpful to know the difference between a dynamic site and a static site.

A static site resides in its entirety on the server. When the viewer clicks on a static site page, the entire page loads along with all of the images on that page. So if there are 20 images, the page loads faster than it would if there were 200 images. Obviously this limits the amount of images you should put on a page. If it loads too slowly, customers leave! On our static sites, we use only small thumbnail images to speed up the process, allowing the customer to bring up a larger version of any single furniture photo that they are interested in. We recommend that customers limit a static site to about 500 images, spread over about 8 pages of showrooms. Most of our clients start with static sites for budgeting purposes (they are much less expensive to build). As web initiated sales increase, clients often move up to dynamic sites as they become more comfortable with the amount of business their web sites generates.

If a larger site is required, or a shopping cart is desired, you will need a "dynamic" site. In a dynamic site, the size is unlimited. The pages are created “on the fly” as the viewer accesses the site, hence the word "dynamic". For example, if a customer is searching for chairs, only the chairs load and the page is created in seconds as the customer clicks on the search function, showing only the furniture they are interested in. Customers can search for chairs, or maple chairs, or chairs from a specific manufacturer, or any other number of parameters. Having a shopping cart does not mean you ship furniture all over the country. You can set up your shopping cart in several ways. Option one: The shopping cart allows the customer to choose only two delivery options: your local delivery service or customer pickup. Option two: Use the shopping cart to offer your standard local delivery for large items and national UPS shipping only for small items. Or you could offer national shipping, or only shipping to the three or four states that surround yours. Having a dynamic site does not mean you have to offer a shopping cart, but you must have a dynamic site to have a good shopping cart. Your policy of shipping furniture should be dictated by the cost and ease of shipping from your local area. Shipping furniture on a national basis is more feasible for stores located in states such as New York and California, than a state such as South Dakota. We recommend that you build a dynamic site for any of the following reasons: a more sophisticated look, faster loading pages, large amounts of inventory can be listed, and the site can be managed through a database. Do not plan on large volume national sales of armoires!

The following are instructions we send a start-up client:

Action list for clients and other useful information:

1. Send us a list of Keywords pertaining to your inventory. (Keywords are codes for the words we put behind your site for the search engines). We have hundreds of keywords for furniture items pretty well covered (beds, chairs, desks, finishes, etc), but if you sell art, picture frames, accessories, etc., we need to know what they are. We will also need the name of every town and location that you want to reach with your website.

2. We have pictures from most unfinished furniture manufacturers and many others from various accessories, appliance and lighting manufacturers. The list of manufacturers we have on file can be found at http://conceptdesigngroup.net/manufacturers.htm. Please identify any other manufacturers you carry in addition to this list, and gather a copy of the catalogue and the CD. If the manufacturers tell you to download their pictures from the web, insist on being sent a CD. There are two problems with downloading the photos from the web. One is that the size may not be correct, and secondly, the labor is almost 400% higher to download one at a time from the web as opposed to just transferring the files from a cd! If only one or two pictures are involved, that is not a problem, but if there is a large quantify of photos, a CD is better.

3. Regarding the design look of the site, we have several QuickStart templates you can use, or we can customize a unique look. Visit sites on the web to search for “looks and styles” that you like. We cannot copy any specific site, but the more we know about what appeals to you, the faster we can create a design that you are happy with. Send a list of sites that interest you. At time, we can arrange a telephone appointment to discuss them. Factors that will influence cost are the use of flash, java drop down navigation structures, and custom graphics. For example, at www.timothydoyle.net, every item on that page is a graphic that has been created in several other programs and then put together so that the pieces automatically resize no matter what browser the viewer is using.

4. Visit all of your vendors sites to determine if you want to link TO them. For example, if they sell online competitively against you, you may not want to refer customers to their site.
Identify good photographs that you might want to include to highlight your website.

5. When your site is up, contact all of your vendors and ask them to list your site on theirs. The more outgoing links you can generate from relevant sites to your site, the better your ranking on the web will be. We also provide the strongest links for you with our web service package. More on that later.

6. When your site goes up, it will be a work in progress. If any pictures are still missing, the image file will carry a message “image not found”. You will see things that you will want to change and need to change. At that time, we will consult with you to prioritize the changes that are most necessary and budget the rest for later.
We look forward to working with you and will do everything we can to assist your success.

Contact Us On Line
or call 800-700-3695 to set up a free web marketing consultation for your business