Ironclad Technology is pleased to be considered for the development of a web site for you. A web site, no matter how well-designed, is meaningless if it lacks the content required to interest customers in the products you sell or the services you provide. Here are a few questions that, once answered, will help ensure that your web site’s message is as appealing as its design. Please complete the four questions below and I’ll be in touch with you about your design.

What is the purpose of your web site?

Most business web sites have two purposes: (1) to educate the consumer and (2) to sell them products or services. If you sell shoes, for example, the purpose of your web site is to educate potential customers on the quality and durability of your shoes and, as a result, to sell them shoes. If you paint houses, the purpose of your web site is to educate homeowners on why your services are superior to other painters and sell them on hiring you to paint their house. By defining the purpose of your web site, you will give the designer the information required to create a web site that best conveys that purpose to your target audience.

Who is my target audience?

Your target audience consists of those folks you want to attract to your web site: potential and current customers, future and current employees, possible investors and so on. Anyone who might be interested in your company and its products or services is a member of your target audience. Correctly identifying your target audience is vital, since your web site should be designed specifically to appeal to your target audience. Put yourself in their shoes (or in front of their computers). Imagine your web site through their eyes. If you were visiting a web site such as yours, what would you expect to find and what would you be disappointed not to find? Identify your target audience, then have your web site designed to fulfill their needs and surpass their expectations.

What content should my web site feature?

Your web site content should be driven by the nature of your business. If you’re a real estate agent, your site should feature photographs of homes you have for sale and information on buying and selling a home. If you own an auto body shop, your site might feature before and after photographs of cars that you have repaired. Remember to determine the purpose of your site, then develop the content to serve that purpose.

What’s my competition doing?

The last question you should ask is one of the most important: What is your competition doing on the Web? Do a Google search for similar businesses and click around their web sites. How are their web sites designed? What message are they trying to convey? Are they doing a good job of conveying that message and, as a result, selling products? What do you like about their web sites? What don’t you like? Make note of the things you like and the things you hate, then share your findings with Integrated-Digital-Solutions.

If you have a particular theme for your web site in mind, we at Ironclad Technology can implement your ideas right away. If you are unsure, we already have themes for, but not limited to:

Other Categories Available

Of course, you are not limited to just the entries above. We can do anything with your site that you want. We tend to lean towards speed, reliability, and compatibility rather than flashy logos and designs.

We have these themes, plus many more available for immediate use. Or we can customize one you already have. Just let us know how you want your site to look and we can make the design for you.

Free Templates

We often use free templates from a variety of web sources as inspiration or a basis for your design. We make your site unique to your requirements.

Purchase Templates

If you have purchased a custom template, let us know and we can integrate it into your new design.

Using the industry standard software, Joomla!, you are able to maintain and update the content for your web site. To be successful, business professionals must communicate with colleagues, customers, and partners on a regular basis and provide them with up-to-date web and blog content. For personal use, Joomla! gives you a single tool for all your web publishing needs, helping you create, update, and edit web content and blog entries quickly, easily, and safely. You can even create and assign roles to others so that they can maintain content. This software allows you to update your website from anywherec!

Give you a single tool for web publishing

Keep your web site content fresh and blog entries current with a single application. True WYSIWYG authoring capabilities make it easy to publish new or update existing content in three simple steps: Just open the page, make the changes, and click save. Your changes are published just that fast.

Maintain web site integrity

Thanks to integration with our design software, web designers and developers can create page templates with editable regions, helping to ensure that web site look and feel is not compromised — even when multiple authors update content across the site. If you want to change the overall look and feel of your site, you can do that without compromising the content. The information presented and how the information is presented are kept separate.

Control web site authoring permissions and content approval workflow

Use fine-grained permissions to define who can edit a web site or update specific content on a page within a site. Or limit certain users to "edit only, no publish" to help ensure content adheres to defined approval workflows.

Help you get started with blogging

Let us help you take advantage of the latest in online communication using the same familiar environment they use to update web site content. Add tags to blog entries without messy HTML coding, and use any tag repository to help other users find the blog content. The native search feature also helps those identify content both in the titles but also within the body of your articles.

Easy to Use

Joomla! makes publishing content to web sites and blogs a straightforward process without requiring users to learn HTML. Thanks to a true WYSIWYG authoring environment, content authors and contributors can edit or update any web site or blog in three simple steps:

1. Open the web page or blog entry that needs updating or editing.
2. Click Edit to make changes to the web page or blog entry.
3. Click Save to post and publish the new content.

This intuitive experience offers point-and-click simplicity — no more complicated forms for simple updates. Incorporating rich media, images, or even Flash® Video is as simple as dragging and dropping the file onto the web page or blog entry. There is no easier way to keep web sites and blogs fresh and current than with Contribute.

The Ironclad Technology Dynamic Content Catalog with numerous topics helps you to increase your website's entertainment value and to always present up-to-the-minute content.

Dynamic Content

Dynamic content is news articles, games, and other useful information that you can add to your website. Click on a topic, and there you can set up how the content will be presented. A link will be given to you that you can build into your website. When your visitors click on this link, they will see the content. The content is updated automatically, so that your visitors can use your site as a source of information.

News

National and international news headlines. {jumi [/jumi/juminews.html]}

Maps

A domain name is an address on the Internet. Just as your street address must be unique so that the post office can deliver mail to you, and your telephone number must be unique so that customers can call you, your domain name must be unique so your e-mail reaches you and customers can visit your Web site. An international address system, called the Domain Name System (DNS), was developed to ensure that every computer connected to the Internet has its own address. In the DNS system, however, that address is actually a set of numbers such as 164.223.161.99, which is called the computer's Internet Protocol (IP) address. Because these numbers are difficult for humans to remember, DNS allows you to assign a domain name, such as google.com, to your IP address. Now, when you want to visit Google's Web site, you can type www.google.com instead of 164.223.161.99.

Top-Level Domain (TLD)

Every domain name is composed of two parts: a TLD (top-level domain) and a second-level domain. In the domain name amazon.com, the .com part is the top-level domain, and the word amazon is the second-level domain. While there are an almost infinite number of second-level domains, there are a limited number of generic TLDs, some of which are shown in the following table.

In addition to generic TLDs, there are a growing number of country code (cc) TLDs which associate Web sites with a particular country. For instance, .us can be used by companies in the United States . If you are an international company or do extensive business with another country, consider registering a domain name with the appropriate country code. Note that rules vary by country; some require your business to be incorporated in that country to qualify for their cc TLD. More than 130 country codes are currently in use; the following table lists a few.

Deciding which TLDs are right for you is a balancing act. Remember that business1000.com is an entirely different address than business1000.biz, business1000.pro, and business1000.us. If you own two of those names and someone else owns the other two, there is a real danger that your customers will end up at the other company's site, and vice-versa. You may want to own several TLDs to prevent this from happening. However, each TLD costs a separate fee to register and maintain, and new TLDs are introduced regularly. For small businesses, the .com TLD remains absolutely necessary, and many companies also purchase .biz.

Second-Level Domain

The second-level domain is what most people think of as their company's domain name-it is the verio in verio.com, the google in google.com. The second-level domain is how your company will be known and remembered: think of it as a vital extension of your brand. You are free to create any second-level domain name that you want, as long as no one else is already using it. Here are several additional factors to consider:

• Part of your business name: In many cases your domain name will include your company's actual name or an abbreviation of that name. For instance, the domain name for The Lady & Sons restaurant in Savannah is ladyandsons.com.

In certain cases, however, it may be better to choose a domain name that reflects the product you sell or the industry you serve. The Bed & Breakfast Associates of Bay Colony helps customers make reservations at bed & breakfasts in the Boston area. Their domain name is bnbboston.com.

• Incorporating key words: When customers use a search engine to locate a business, they use keywords to describe what they are looking for. Some experts believe that incorporating a relevant keyword into your domain name helps ensure that it is listed near the top of customers' search results. So if your company's name is Hannah's Internet Café and you sell fresh coffee beans from around the world, you might incorporate the keyword coffee in your domain by registering hannahcoffee.com.
• Short, memorable, and unique: Your domain name should be easy for people to remember: this usually means making it short and unique. For example, if your company's name is David's Lawn and Landscaping Advice, you might choose a name like davidlawn.com. However, if there is already a davidlawns.com or a davidlawngrass.com, you should probably chose a different name because yours is no longer unusual; customers may confuse it with your competitors' sites and go there instead.

Domain names such as amazon.com and monster.com have nothing obvious to do with their businesses, but the names are unusual, memorable, and effective. If you want to build a new brand with your domain name, however, be aware that common words like monster and amazon are much more difficult to trademark. Training customers to associate an unusual word with your business usually take a lot more marketing muscle.

• Misspellings: If your name contains words that are commonly misspelled, you might consider registering those misspelled versions, as well. For instance, if you own a plumbing company and your domain name is plumberfriend.com, you might also register plumberfreind.com so that people who misspell your name still find your Web site.
• Be aware of trademarks: Under U.S. law, domain names are intellectual property. If your domain name includes someone else's registered trademark, you can be held liable for damages in civil court. Under the Anticybersquatting Consumer Protection Act of 1999, you can also be held liable if you register a domain name that contains someone else's trademark, even if you don't actively use that domain name. This same law protects you: if someone else has registered a domain name that contains your trademark, and they are using that name for commercial purposes (including trying to sell it to you), you may be able to pursue legal action.

Before finalizing your domain name, go to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (www.uspto.gov) to perform a free trademark search. You can also review relevant laws and regulations at this site, including the Anticybersquatting Act. If you are uncomfortable dealing with these legal issues, consider seeking an attorney that specializes in trademarks.

Each domain added to your contract has a minimum term of one year and will be charged for this period in advance. It is included in your cost.

While the following table is by necessity somewhat subjective, it will give you an idea of the usability and credibility attached to different domain extensions.

http://www.igoldrush.com/alt_ext3.htm

Initial Design and Registration

If you have a particular theme for your web site in mind, we at Ironclad Technology can implement your ideas right away. Our cost is minimal.

• Domain Name registration
• Up to 15 pages of content
• 2gb email address
• Dynamic content
• Custom theme designed to your specifications
• Technical support for one year
• Custom error pages (for example, custom 404 Error)
• Hosting for one year
• Online software so that you can modify the content when you choose and from where you choose

Suggestions for page content

You control everything but here are some things that you would likely need.

Page	Description
Home Page	Introduction to services and products
Article Pages	Up to six article pages, written by the client
FAQ	Frequently Asked Questions
Catalog	Online ordering capabilities, product images and descriptions
Customer Orders	Online contact request and information-gathering form
Shipping	Shipping options and costs
Guarantee	Product warranty information
Testimonials	Comments and feedback from customers
Privacy Policy	Company privacy policy
Contact Us	Company address, phone, fax, email link, map, online contact form
Site Map	Outline of the web site
Photo Gallery	Upload and categorize your photo collection

Get the complete package for $1000. (That’s  under $3 a day for the first year including all of the design work, domain registration, hosting, software configuration, regular backups, and any system updates.)

Recurring cost beyond the first year

Renew all of the software licenses and keep all of the above services for only $250. (That’s under $30 a month for continued support, maintenance, and domain renewal.)