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Absolutely - so long as you are happy with it & you can get hold of the original “digital” file. The key with all images on the web, & this is especially the case with logos - of course - is high quality! Every time one messes with an image in a PC package, the quality of the image tends to degrade. If we absolutely have to, we can scan in your logo from a letterhead, for instance, and then recreate. That will take time & use up more of your money. If your original logo designer is not around, or you cannot get hold of the original digital artwork, that may be the only option. Of course, we could always refresh the logo whilst we are at it!
Absolutely can - it will make sense, however, to have an email address that matches your “domain name”. So, for instance, if your website is www.XYZ.co.za, then it looks much more professional to have an address which looks like: john@XYZ.co.za. If you currently have email with MWEB or similar, then your new address can be “pointed” to the old one so that you still get all your emails in one place, should you wish. PetalWeb provides these email addresses for Free so it is worth going the whole hog!!
Web 2 is simply understood - it is in effect the “interactive” web, defined by sites such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter. These sites have created absolutely massive communities of users, who drive the content of those sites entirely. Simply put but that is Web2 - in a nutshell.
Is it important? If you have a product around which you can create a community - an easy example would be a specialist magazine of some sort - then it is in fact critical. One exploits the Web 2 sites to create your own customer community, link that community to your web site, collect email addresses from that community to which you would automatically send alerts & messages via Facebook or Twitter, and even use those lists to create sales channels for products you have discovered which could add to your range. Doing this has made some people extremely rich indeed but it is not effort free - it takes work to pull it all off. The final point here is that these sites are incredibly good SEO drivers - if your site is linked to & from these Web 2 sites many hundreds of times, your site will relatively quickly be treated by Google et al as an “authority” site - & that has huge benefits for your site’s visibility. Believe it or not, this paragraph is a very short version of the whole story, but I’m sure you get the idea.
A domain name, also often referred to as a URL or Universal Resouce Locator, is a specific web site address name that you choose & register - you own this name for as long as you pay for it. In South Africa, the fee is due annually & is generally under R100 per annum. For the avoidance of any doubt, this website’s name is www.petalweb.co.za.
The key here is quality - if you are selling products, you will definitely need to have your products presented in the best possible way. If you feel that you are a really competent photographer, then of course, you should take the job on yourself. We can give very straight forward guidance here because we have been through the whole gamut of issues with photos many, many times. For most of our customers it has proved worthwhile to employ someone - and it need not cost a fortune at all. It certainly saves everyone a considerable amount of time!
SEO - or Search Engine Optimisation - is absolutely key to getting your new site recognised & listed by the search engines. There are really only three that matter on a global scale, that is Google, Yahoo & Bing but there are also a few locally in South Africa that matter too. The importance of SEO cannot be underestimated if you are in a competitive business, and it means that the keywords used to identify your site to the search engines have to be right, the site’s description has to be right and so on. A critical factor is the initial research into keywords that PetalWeb will undertake immediately you have chosen to use our services, & from there one has to use those keywords consistently throughout the process.
The plain fact of the matter is that SEO will always be an extremely “arcane” science since the search engines, upon which everyone depends for visibility on the web, change their technology from time to time & keeping up with them is extremely hard indeed. In addition, they do not actually reveal how they “rank” sites. That being said, there are a number of straightforward measures that PetalWeb always implements at the outset which will ensure that each site is properly set up for whatever the Search Engine wizards throw at us!
For a small Starter Site, once all the material is to hand, & the “look” has been agreed this should not take longer than a few days. The overall dependency is on the total client workload we are dealing with.
