Unfortunately this post is all questions and no answers. I have begun to investigate these mysteries and I will report back once this is solved. I’ve submitted a question to the company and I’ll post again when I get the results.

I can tell you that the competition to be #1 on any related phrase like “Manhattan Bakery” or “New York Bakery” is high. The Google Adwords Keyword Tool estimates there are 50,000 searches a month for the phrase New York Bakery. So to get a place as the #1 listing on Google Maps is hugely valuable. What’s it worth? Thousands of dollars a month IMHO.So I’m hugely interested in how they did this.

Google used to call these the LBC or Local Business Center Listings. And since they change things fast with Maps, it’s now called Google Places.

Here’s what it looks like:

Since the Google Places Listing is “above the fold”, surfers get to look at it first, before they see the main list of results. That makes it very valuable to a business that wants to get seen by prospects surfing the web. Most business owners simply don’t know about the Google Places Listings and how much business they generate which is tens of thousands of phone calls and website lookups every day.

How Much Does A Google Place Listing Cost?

It’s free. That is IF you know how to enter all the information correctly without violating the sometimes vague Google Quality Guidelines.

But most companies charge between $500 and $1,000 as a one time fee for getting your listing in the Google Local, Yahoo Local, and Bing / MSN Local Directories as they’re called. Web Design Workplace charges $500 to get you into all 3 directories. It’s something we’ve done around 100 times and we’re very good at it. Considering how much time it takes to get this done right, that $500 fee is downright affordable. For some businesses it can be the most affordable business advertising they ever paid for.

Claiming a Google Places Listing

Google may already have a listing for you even if you don’t own a website. It does this by using “citations” from other trusted sources like review blogs and listings in other websites like Best Of the Web. Whether Google has the information or you need to enter it for the first time, there is a verification process called “claiming” your listing. If you can do all that by yourself that’s great but most get hung up somewhere along the way. To avoid any hassles and ensure it’s done right call Mal Milligan the owner of Web Design Workplace at 201-696-5375.

When You Hire a Big Web Design Company (Our Competition), This is What You Get

• Big Companies doing web design can have hundreds of employees and thousands of clients. Doesn’t that make you feel small and insignificant?
• If they loose your business they think “So what? We lost a faceless name in a crowd of strangers.  Business as usual.”
• With hundreds of people to pay the whole team feels it’s OK to charge clients huge sums of money if they can “get away with it”.
• Big Box web design companies  justify charging 10 times the price that a smaller company charges because: “the client charges a lot too so they deserve to be charged even more”.
• Since it’s hard enough trying to deliver on the items they sold in the first place, the big box web design companies just can’t afford to be flexible… so they can’t possibly base their offerings on the clients needs and desires the way a small design company can adapt and custom configure.
• When the big box company looses your business they don’t even blink. Loosing customer is so common they get used to it pretty fast. The big company feels their individual clients really are not important. They have thousands more if you leave. The smaller company feels each client is important.
• The big companies frequently use salespeople who get paid on commission. They try to sell clients more and more so they make more and more. The small company wants you to have the right sized package for your needs and budget.

Perplexed. Unable to give an answer. Shocked – unable to speak. Utterly devoid of any reasonable answer.

Yes – that’s fairly common with the big companies that charge 10 times as much as they should for web design. When you ask them questions like that it catches them off-guard for a second. They don’t have a canned response that will work. They know a hundred true answers but they have to scramble for the best lie to tell you and if you’re lucky, you can catch them like this before the gears in their head click and they come up with an appropriate fabrication.

At Web Design Workplace we answer all your website affordability questions.

No matter what you ask, we have an immediate answer because we stick to the truth. It’s easier that way. And we’re here to help you. We take pride in our work. And if you need honest answers we can chat your ear off. No matter how much you want to know we could write the book on website affordability – ask us anything.

Website affordability is a non-issue here. We frequently charge up to 90% less than the big box competitors for a better product with better support. You know the old phrase “If it seems to good to be true than it’s probably not true.” Well Web Design Workplace is from the “Show Me” State in spirit. We build a live mockup of your website so you can check it out and kick the tires before we go live with it. We build the read deal. Affordable Web Design and straight answers every time you have a question.

Want to see for yourself? Call the Boss – Mal Milligan at 201-696-5375

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.

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 !!

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 !!

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.

The book is organized into coherent sections. Images of the homepages of the websites in the book are grouped by:

1. type of website
2. design style
3. design theme
4. color
5. element
6. structure

My favorite part of the book is that it gives dozens of matching color palettes. I am always trying to learn more about colors and everything I can get my hands on goes into my shopping cart. In most books that offer color palettes, I might use 2 in the entire book. That is the case so far with the Web Designer’s Idea Book. I liked a lot of the palettes but in my work I found places to use 2 of the palettes on new sites.  So that is good really.

For most designers, they will find the best part of the book is being able to thumb through it and see hundreds of websites to generate ideas. There are several book series out now that offer the same convenience, and I give this book a Thumbs Up rating for executing the main theme beautifully in comparison to the others. Except for a couple of the initial homepages being standard fare (in everybody’s list of top 100 sites), I found a lot of new sites I have not seen before and I got a lot of great new ideas I can use without doing a straight rip-off copy.

I just saw there is a newer version of this book hitting the Bookstores soon and I cant wait. I’ll buy it the minute I see it.

• Our designs are very attractive.
• Sine we use WordPress, our sites rank quickly on on major Search Engines.
• It is easy to add new pages to our sites – many of our customers do this themselves.
• You can transfer your website to another host for a fee of $100 – we can email you the database and files the same day you need them so they are up to the minute fresh.
• The 90% lower cost of ownership is REAL. Some people don’t believe it. Call Mal at 201-696-5375 and find out.

So back to the question, can you afford 90% Off For a Custom Website? The answer might be: Can you afford NOT to buy a website from Web Design Workplace?

What if you need a 50 page website?

We charge $50 per page after the first 10. Now we will negotiate any situation you may have. If you add the pages yourself we will give you a flat fee for fixing your menu system or whatever particular situation you may have. But if you compare our regular fee for a 50 page website… which is $3,000, that is a 90% savings over a Big Box 30 page site which costs $32,000.Do your comparisons first and stop here to save your firm almost $30,000. That’s exactly what I said… stop by here to save your firm Thirty Thousand Dollars.