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Affordable Web Design Does Not Mean Cheap

October 30, 2010 By einstein99

Many times I get inquiries on this website it’s from someone who might be better off filtering through the trash on Craigslist rather than looking for a super professional like myself to do a web job for them. They have vague notions of what they want, they think they can get it for 8 bucks an hour, and they really truly believe the latest 1997 design is fantastic. Wow. These are the people I politely answer questions for and never hear from again. Which is actually a good thing.

Affordable web design is done professionally and artistically but above all else, with no over inflation about value. Web Design WorkPlace gives incredible VALUE to our customers and we usually do it 4 times better than the so called top company in the business, and we do it at one tenth the price. That’s what makes it affordable. It is not cheap. It is not less in any way except the cost in dollars to the customer. And it’s only available like that because I broke off as the top ranking SEO with a huge mega company making the top custom attorney web sites around, and now I’m doing it on my own with some friends. So that’s why it so affordable. Because my business is young. And actually I will never be able to lie or cheat as well as the big companies so I will never charge even half of their rip-off prices.

I have a half dozen web designer friends that all came from the mega company that I still chat with on a daily or weekly basis. One is a real artist and she sells template sites much like I do. She says over and over again that most of her customers have no idea what WordPress is. They have no idea what a template is. Even after she explains it to them, they still have no idea what a template site is. Except for about 10% that really get it. Now those 10% are usually clients that have had websites for a while. They may have had a number of different websites like plain HTML, or Flash, and they may have used WordPress or other blogs before. Those are the customers she makes the most money from and they are also the customers that ask for the most in terms of making the website work with Google ranking. They can appreciate excellent web design and they understand pricing having been there several times before.

The clients that get to my site usually type “affordable web design” on Google. I’m usually on page 2 now but I’ll push it up to page 1 when I’m good and ready probably before Christmas. Most of those surfers actually want “cheap web design” and they have no idea what the difference is nor do they care. They just want to get on the web for as cheap a price as possible. So they don’t care if their company name does not appear on Google, or Bing, or Yahoo searches. That escapes them. They want cheap. That is their focus. Not an inch further toward a goal for example. A goal like “obtain more internet exposure to get more customers and impress current clients”. They don’t get that far. They only get as far as goal: get a cheap website. And you know with websites as with many other things in life, you frequently get exactly what you pay for.

So for the record affordable does not mean cheap. Affordable is well built, good looking, fully featured, and it costs less because the company that made it is discounting the product for some reason. Affordable is sometimes mistaken for cheap. Products that are cheap are not well made, they are made to meet minimal standards but cost less. People who are looking for cheap websites should really go dumpster diving on Craigslist where they will find all kinds of the lowest form of vendor. And I am not recommending it but I tried advertising there a few times and got the worst clients and had to get rid of them all.

Affordable Website Hosting

October 17, 2010 By einstein99

Forget everything you’ve ever heard or seen about web hosting for a minute and note I am not getting paid a dime for what I am about to write. This is totally unsolicited. As a former Senior Technical Officer and Supervisor of Local Area Network Operations for the Smith Barney World Headquarters in NYC, The Citibank World HQ, Chase World HQ, and as a Technical Officer at the World Headquarters of AIG and Kidder Peadbody… and a consultant to the World HQ of Hertz, I’ve had a million road miles with iSP’s and hosting vendors. I’ve used at least 50 over the years in various capacities.

My recommendation to you right now in October 2010 is go to HostGator for any and all of your hosting needs. There is simply no way to beat their outstanding level of support at any price. And on top of that, there is no way to beat their price either.

After 7 years with a smaller vendor who was run by a a person I had previously described as “brilliant” and “impeccably honest”, I lost 30 WordPress sites to a cross site SQL Injection. I found out that this small vendor still had never learned to do a backup properly 7 years after loosing an entire server with no backups. They had no monthly backups, no archives. No yearlies. Only 2 weeks worth of incrementals. And when I asked for the restore a technician told me they did not have them at all. Wow. I spent the next 16 hours rebuilding the top 15 sites from scratch and then another technician told me like a clown walking in uninvited that he had “found” the backup tape… knowing well that I had just spent the last 16 hours rebuilding from the point I was told there were no backups. Nightmare. That is unfortunately typical for what you can expect at a small vendor. I have many more nightmare episodes to tell you about that vendor later but the lesson learned: Avoid small Hosting vendors like the plague.

Here is the main page for HostGator. Probably the nicest looking Hosting website anywhere and there is a ton of plan information if you look around and shop. There are regular hosting plans, reseller, VPS, and dedicated. Standard mix really. I’ve used them all with the exception of dedicated. I’ve used their chat line at least 50 times. It rocks. The technicians are super well educated. They are better educated than technicians I have worked with at any other hosting vendor ever. I’d put them in a support class like the former legendary Netware Premium Support which was 10 grand a year back in the day and only available to Enterprise users.

OK Here is a sticky caveat. I’m an SEO and I use dedicated unique class c IP addresses all the time. If you want to get an account with unique class c ip addresses from HostGator, you have to use this chinsey website called SEOHosting.com to buy a bundle of 5 IP’s minimum. OK I see how it works, but I don’t really get why the website looks so bare bones… even sexually suggestive. The website is Thumbs Down – Beneath Grade – Not Commensurate with the product offering or level of support. I do hope they get their act together on this and get a better website. I could certainly build them one Affordably!

So I just bought a SEOHosting Reseller with 5 IP’s and I setup private nameservers. I’ll let you all know how well it is working out in a month or two. Until then I can tell you the same 200 support people that pick up the chat line for HostGator also pick up the chat line for SEOHosting. It’s the same company. Different front end for the sale.

OK some standard stuff to show. This is a CPanel for the VPS3 package I bought with HostGator. The support was just over the top excellent. I’m a former Master CNE and MCSE but learning how to fly in my first Virtual Private Server was a bit daunting… the HG support made it good. The VPS turned out to be a little under powered for the number WordPress plugins I needed to run but the speed was excellent when I used fastCGI and WP-Super-Cache.

Many of their plans come with a WHM or WebHost Manager. This is the one for the VPS3 I bought. I spent 40 a month just for the VPS3 and an additional 10 a month for the Cpanel. I also has a couple extra dedicated IP addresses which were cheap, only 1 buck a month each.

Here’s a look at VZ or the Parallels® Virtuozzo container manager. There is not much to configure here but it provides a graphical interface to control the VPS under Apache on a Linux server. It’s free with most HG VPS solutions.

Here’s the proof in the pudding. I setup a test account on Pingdom which runs an http load test on the homepage every 5 minutes. I ran it from the wee hours on Sunday morning all through the wee hours of Monday AM and found ZERO defects in uptime. Outstanding. I know they ran backups during this time period. A bad hosting company will allow the websites to drop during backups and they will still call that “uptime”. That should be considered false advertising and it should be illegal really. HostGator was flawless in this particular test. I will report when they stumble to be fair of course but this is the good start I anticipated after all my favorable interactions with support during the last 3 weeks. Check them out.

Filed Under: Learn About WordPress Tagged With: hosting, web hosting

Affordable Government Websites?

August 21, 2010 By einstein99

You bet. Web Design Workplace builds MultiSite WordPress systems where dozens of websites can run from a single control panel. Once the initial site is up, building new sites later is much faster and way less expensive. WordPress 3.x might be the most affordable web platform for multiple government sites.

Government websites have common requirements and they can be attained with old style HTML websites or the modern WordPress style. But of course there are advantages and disadvantages to every choice in the computer world. Lets look at some of the requirements and then look at how affordable we can make them by choosing old HTML or new WordPress.

Government Website Requirements:

Security. The site must have an encrypted communications pipeline between the workstation and server. This is called “SSL” for the Secure Sockets Layer protocol. Also note that this SSL link must allow secure logins and also secure work on the administration area or dashboard. Not one or the other but both.
Backups. There has to be a mechanism to backup the site and the data and to restore the backup quickly.
Multi-Language Support. Many countries now require multi-language support at some level.
Ease of use to add / change / or delete content.
Provide alternate ways to read images for visually challenged readers.
Add captioning for video and sound media.

Security

HTML does not provide it naively but it can be custom built in. It’s expensive and proprietary.
WordPress has SSL capability build in. Except for the Secure Certificate which is needed at the server level, it’s free.

Backups

HTML and WordPress can be backed up at the server level using common server backup mechanisms.
WordPress allows MySQL Exports and XML post exports for finer backup granularity.

Multi-Language Support

HTML does not offer it. It can be done manually and it’s expensive.
WordPress has numerous plugins both free and proprietary that translate posts. WordPress itself can be setup in about 50 different languages so the Dashboard is all in the native language.

Ease of Use

HTML requires years of training and hands-on practice before modifications can be made to a page.
WordPress allows non-technical people to add / change / or delete content. WordPress also allows non-technical users to change the entire menu system easily.

Provide Alternate Text for Images

HTML allows this – but you have to be a computer programmer in order to write the HTML code or PHP language to actually implement it.
WordPress allows non-technical users to add alt text to all the images from the Dashboard / Media center.

Which is a better option for Affordable Government Websites? WordPress is the winner in almost every category.

Filed Under: Learn About WordPress Tagged With: affordable government websites, affordable websites

Chris Brogan Endorses Studio Press

August 5, 2010 By einstein99

I use Studio Press Themes and I’ve purchased 3 Developer Licenses for Studio Press since 2008. And now in 2010 there are a lot of celebrity social media pundits like Chris Brogan that are going with Studio Press and for very good reasons. It’s the best supported Premium WordPress Theme in the world. Bar none. There is a team of brilliant and above technical people involved with Studio Press and I know 5 on the team personally. Great bunch. For a person that builds out websites all day and half the night, Studio Press is like getting car racing parts directly from the Ferrari Factory.

Well here is a video from a presentation Chris gave last year:

Now if you are a DIY “Do It Yourselfer” go ahead and give Studio Press and WordPress a try. If you don’t want to get involved with HTML, and graphics, and hosting, and domains, and SEO, and PHP, then call Mal Milligan at 201-696-5375 and talk about your web design options. Web Design Workplace is a group of long time web design professionals that can give you a complete website in a week or two at a fraction of the cost most of the big design companies charge.

Web Design Workplace uses only top shelf components like WordPress and Studio Press and HostGator and Adobe. We are world class experts in every phase of web design and roll out. This is where affordable web design lives now. It’s here at Web Design Workplace.

Filed Under: Learn About WordPress, Web Designer's Corner Tagged With: endorsing Studio Press

Harvard Uses WordPress

August 5, 2010 By einstein99

My brother is finishing his Masters in Information Technology at Harvard in 3 more classes. Wow. I was cruising around the various PR8 and PR7 websites he uses and I was not surprised to find a plethora of WordPress in the mix. Why was I not surprised? WordPress is simply excellent in terms of functionality, reliability, artistic possibilities, and price. And that’s why Web Design Workplace is so devoted to WordPress.

If Harvard Uses WordPress – You Should Too

That’s right. There are now countless institutions of higher learning that use WordPress. It’s everywhere these days. This is one of those situations in life where you can let others Guinea Pig the prototypes and when the technology is mature, you can jump in. Well the technology IS mature and by all means, it makes sense to get a website with WordPress now or convert your old HTML site to WP now.

A recent survey of 6000 blogs showed 34% of the WordPress sites 5 years ago were still using WP today. Blogger held up with 20%. But that’s real staying power.

Filed Under: Learn About WordPress Tagged With: who's using wordpress

Affordable Web Design Philosophy

July 22, 2010 By einstein99

The last company I worked for charged between $10,000 and $32,000 for custom websites. Wow!! Those websites had no e-commerce or special features of any kind. They were made with the old style HTML language. The sites themselves were hosted on a complex proprietary hosting scheme that was not perfectly search engine friendly like Web Design WorkPlace sites are. Because they were a big company, they used their reputation and a sales force of thousands of full time people on commission. Naturally the sales people did not get paid if they did not sell. So they were motivated to sell even if there was little or no benefit to the customer. And on top of that, the more they sold, the more money they made in commissions. So their main focus was to sell as much as possible no matter what was best for the client. Their goals were totally inappropriate in my opinion.

Web Design Workplace has an affordable web design philosophy.

We can take that same 10 page website that the big box company made for $10,000 and we can sell it for as little as $1,000 depending on your content requirements. That’s a 90% savings… and that’s just the up front savings in the purchase price. There are more savings we can talk about later. Our site will probably rank faster on Google and Yahoo and Bing / MSN too because we use WordPress. Our sites have a structure that lends itself to good SEO (search engine optimization). And we make sure every page we put up is fully optimized. Every page we go live with has the “under the hood” features Search Engine spiders are looking for.

So our affordable web design philosophy is:

To provide the customer with a beautiful hand made product at a great price. Simple. Elegant. Perfect in every functional detail.

Web design Workplace for all your affordable web design needs. We are also world class experts at SEO and we can provide search engine optimization services whether you need to rank on Page One for Google, or you need to get your listing in the Google Local Maps directory. We work with Bing and Yahoo Local as well. Our SEO philosophy is also to provide the best service at an affordable price.

Call 201-696-5375 to talk with the Boss – Mal Milligan.

Filed Under: Learn About WordPress, Web Designer's Corner

WordPress Public Library Websites

July 15, 2010 By einstein99

WordPress is the ideal web platform for public libraries these days. It’s free, it’s easy for a library staff to install and maintain, and when the staff runs into trouble there is lots of help available in free forums and paid Theme support forums. And there are a lot of consultants and web design companies like Web Design Workplace that can be hired for new builds or repairs. Take a look at this WordPress Public Library Website for the town of Dartmouth MA.

It’s a fully functional library site that borders on artistic. They are using a custom made vertical menu bar on the left sidebar, and a horizontal menu bar under the header. They did not go to a flyout 2nd level on the horizontal menu system but they did not see need to. You will notice an alignment issue near the bottom of the image. That’s the kind of problem a librarian might not be able to solve for her / himself. But the good thing is that there are plenty of qualified WordPress consultants running around working for peanuts.

Would I make any changes to this site? Well yes, a few changes… first I would fix the alignment near the footer of course. But besides that I would do a good tune-up to the meta titles and meta descriptions on every page, I would change the permalinks structure to give better keywords to the urls, and I would look at some new Themes with brighter colors. In particular, the vertical menu in the left sidebar might look nicer with some nice CSS based color backgrounds.

I’m overall impressed with the site and I have the compliment the Dartmouth MA Public Library for picking WordPress and implementing it so well with a really nice style. Job well done !!

Filed Under: Learn About WordPress Tagged With: wordpress example, wordpress public library

Looking For An Affordable Library Website?

July 11, 2010 By einstein99

You just got to the right place. Affordable Library Websites used to mean a home made looking patchwork of links that one of the Research Librarian’s nephew put together. When the library needed to do updates, it was difficult and it took a long time to get someone to update the complicated mess. Patrons were at first impressed that the public library had the technical know how to build a website, then quickly relayed complaints that it was not organized correctly or it was missing important information.

Using WordPress, public libraries all over the world can have a beautiful website that is easy to add to or change in any way, and meets any budget. Check out a color variation we are trying on this site:

Web Design Workplace can install a base site for you and you can add as many pages as you like. You can change the selections on the menu’s. And when a task seems a little bit too difficult for your staff to handle, we are here with 24 hour service to do the tricky stuff for you with affordable everyday prices.

You can have a stunning site, that is up to the minute accurate every day of the year at a price you though was just not possible. Call Web Design Workplace owner Mal Milligan today at 201-696-5375. Check out our designs and let us put you online with style !!

Filed Under: Learn About WordPress

Affordable Anti-Virals – You Have No Bargain Choices

July 10, 2010 By einstein99

I have been using anti-virals since 1987. Professionally, I got hit by a legendary Jerusalem B virus that incapacitated thousands of PC’s on Wall Street in New York City in 1990. So for 20 years as a Supervisor of Local Area Networks for 5 of the biggest financial companies in the world, I managed the rollout of anti-virals on 5,000 to 10,000 PC’s in the Manhattan Campus and on thousands of computers in 100+ countries all over the world. So I know too much about anti-virals probably.

Is There An Affordable Anti-Viral Right Now?

Short Answer = NO. I use either Norton or McAfee on all my machines and they aint cheap. But this one in particular is undesirable to me… Norton 360. I’ve had to uninstall it twice from the same machine so far because it automatically installs an unwanted toolbar. That toolbar reduced my work area on the screen and I had to go to the FireFox Tools / Addons to disable it and get rid of it. So I am writing support and I will update this post if I get the other features I don’t need and don’t want supressed. My recommendation to my customers: Don’t Buy Norton 360…. unless you want all kinds of features that I would not trust… like PC Tuneups and PC backups. I take care of those myself. Thank You.

Filed Under: Learn About WordPress

WordPress for Non-Profits

June 14, 2010 By einstein99

WordPress is a perfect website choice for many non-profit organizations. We just did a site for a local Public Library and it’s a good example to demonstrate the message here. I’ll make a list of reasons but first mention that WordPress started out as a blogging platform, and it quickly evolved into a framework that allows rapid website development. Almost everyone has heard of “blogging”, or “Blogger” or “WordPress”, but the word is still getting out that there has been an absolute revolution in web design created by WordPress. Non-Profit organizations are switching to WordPress in short order these days and for good reason:

Reasons Why WordPress and Non Profit Organizations Go Together

WordPress is free to use and it”s Open Source so it’s supported by hundreds of developers and thousands of organizations.
You do not need to be a web designer or a computer programmer to build and maintain a WordPress website or to add new content.
WordPress websites have a structure that major search engines like Google, Yahoo, and Bing / MSN like, which makes getting your information into the search engines a lot easier and faster.
The flexibility in terms of appearance and functionality is nearly unlimited. WordPress can display video, images, slideshows, .pdf’s, and text using artistic rendering as limitless as the owners imagination.
WordPress acts like a CMS content management system. When the content is added, it actually gets put into a database. So you can change the outside appearance of the site – the look and feel – but still have exactly the same content.
It is easy to find an affordable professional to help with building or changing a WordPress website.
Programmers write free WordPress “plugins” for every conceivable additional function you could possibly use with a website so you might never need to custom manufacture a software module. It’s all “off-the-shelf” and free.
There are tons of resources to help you learn about using WordPress from books, to videos, to public access seminars and meetups.