About websites 

Looking at Your Websites Possibility
            About Websites by our web builder for your information. 

Richard Jones of DawnWeaver Ltd. is an excellent web designer and builder and has served us well with and our main site, and if he can help you that is just great. If you are not sure about a website he will spend time talking to you if you would like to phone him, he is a nice bloke and has lots of patience. Read what he has to say about websites and if you are interested you will find his web address is at the end.

Why have a web site?
A web site will

• give you a presence on the internet which will offer your goods or services to a wider market place.
• make it easy for people to contact you.
• allow you to control your own advertising and to display what you have to offer.
• allow you to interacting more fully with potential clients
• Give you a platform to get your message across to the world

The Design Process
Getting a web site does not need to be a complicated process provided you have the support of a competent web designer. There are three things that you need to arrange to get a working web site. A good web designer will sort all this for you but they will need some input and ideas from yourself.

1. Design the Web Site
The most obvious one of these is to design and build the site itself and to create the files and databases needed. Most people will arrange for a Web Designer to do this for them. You will need to have some ideas of your own to give the designer something to work with (most web designers are not clairvoyant). Before you approach a designer you need to do some homework and decide your requirements. Spend some time surfing the net looking for web sites of practitioners similar to yourself. Whilst you are doing this make a note of the web addresses of any sites which you like and also any sites which you do not like. Also look for specific features that you would like to include on your own site.

You may wish to consider including such features as: 

• A contact form to take a potential customer's queries and to send them to you as emails.
• A forum for your students to discuss any topics which they consider to be relevant.
• A diary advertising your classes which you can easily update yourself.
• A page of praise from happy customers.
• On line booking for your classes.
• A page for the public to request absent healing.
• A page incorporating a small slide show with views of your healing rooms.

Try and have some ideas regarding your choice of colours. Remember that the web site is there, amongst other things, to display your energies so try to select colours and images which reflect this. This service will usually be subject to a single payment for the design.

2. Purchase Hosting for the Site
Once you have the files you will need to get them onto the internet. To do this you need to rent part of the internet to lodge your design. This process is known as Hosting. This can usually all be sorted by your web designer if you wish. They can select a suitable hosting company, arrange the hosting and upload all the files for you. Uploading files is an easy and quick process with the correct utilities. You will need to pay (usually) annually for the hosting.

3. Register a domain name
Finally you need an internet address so that people can type it into their browser to find your web site. To do this you purchase a domain name. This needs to be unique for each web site so there is an extremely large register and several sub registers which hold the domain name information. There are many web sites where you can search for a domain name to see if it is already in use or is free for sale. Again, your web designer will probably be pleased to arrange this for you. Once the domain name has been purchased and registered in your name (make sure that it is registered in your name and not in the name of your designer) it is necessary to tell the register that this domain needs to point to your hosting web site. This is done by editing the name servers (or DNS) on the site where the domain was purchased. If your web designer registers the domain for you they will certainly do this for you. It can take up to 48 hours for this information to be updated on the main register but it is usually a lot quicker than that. You will need to pay (usually) annually for this domain name to be re-registered in your name.

And that's it. Type in your domain name in a browser and you should see your web design in all its glory.

Once you have a domain name and hosting then it is a simple matter for your designer to set up email accounts for you so that you can have an email address such as <your name>@<your web address>

There are a few other things that you should consider at this point.

Maintenance
Once the initial design is completed and paid for you would normally pay for any additional work at an hourly rate. Some design companies charge an annual rate for additional work whether you actually need any work doing or not. It is up to you whether you prefer to operate in this way but I encounter many reports of companies who are very quick to take your annual fees and then are quite slow to make any changes that you wish on your site. You will almost certainly need some maintenance work doing from time to time such as updating your course dates, adding new therapies that you may learn, updating phone numbers, addresses, hours of work, prices etc. as well as adding new web pages and features when you need them.

Search Engines
This is an area of web site operation where you will encounter more contradictory information than anywhere else.

There is no magic way to get your web site guaranteed on the first page of any search engine. The only way to try and get there is to pay for promotional costs to improve your position on the lists. There are, however, many things that your web designer can do to get your site as high as possible on the lists and you should ensure that your web designer builds Search Engine Optimisation (or SEO) into their design.

1. Keywords
Amongst other things, good SEO involves the use of keywords in the text on the site at every opportunity. Keywords are the use, within your text, of the words that you would expect your clients to enter into the search engines. If, for example, you felt that your potential clients would be likely to type in ‘Reiki Sheffield' in order to try and find a Reiki practitioner in Sheffield then you should try and incorporate the words ‘Reiki Sheffield' into your text as often as you can whilst still leaving your text readable and of good English. This should not be done to the detriment of the page content. Web sites which are entirely composed of graphic images or Flash movies will fail completely on this important requirement. The text on the home page is the most important but consideration should be given to every page of the site.

2. Submission of web site details to Search Engines
This is now less important than it used to be but it is still a valuable exercise to undertake. This involves notifying the major search engines of your continued presence on the web and passes some basic information to them for display in their searches. It is necessary to repeat this operation regularly. I undertake this task for my clients, submitting their site details monthly to over 500,000 search engines world wide for an annual fee of £10.

3. Pay Per Click (Google Adwords)
Pay per click is a system operated by many search engines where by you pay to have a preferential position on the search results pages. You agree to pay a fixed amount when anyone clicks on your entry. The system means that if no-one clicks on your advert then you would not pay anything so you are only paying for the visits that you get to your site. You can nominate the price per click that you wish to pay. The more that you are prepared to pay then the more frequently you will appear higher up the lists. It is rather like an auction, the more that you are prepared to pay then the more potential clicks you will get.

The most popular pay per click system is Adwords which is run by Google. You may have noticed when you search in Google there are some four line adverts in little boxes on the right side of the page. This is what you get for your money. It only cost you money when someone clicks on one of these links. Any clicks on the main part of the web page are still free. As an example, my Reiki business (The Colours of the Dawn) uses this system. I have my keywords set at around 25p per click which gives me a monthly bill of around £45. This gives me a presence on the first page (almost always) for searches such as ‘Reiki Sheffield'. It is very easy to set up this account and all that you really need to know is what keywords you wish to specify for the account and how much you are prepared to pay when a client gets to your web site using these words. You can change the prices and the key words as often as you wish through you Google account.

My services
My name is Richard Jones and I am a practicing Reiki teacher who took his master level in January 2000. I am based in Sheffield and run a mobile healing service and The Colours of the Dawn School of Reiki. I have been working for myself since October 2005. I have also over 28 years experience in IT and I am a highly experienced web designer also offering design, domain registration and hosting services.

I am pleased to offer you, as a student of   The  ReikiProgressive  Group,   10% off all my standard prices.

For new web sites, I am pleased to offer you a basic starter site for only £275 which includes everything that you need to get yourself on line. This will give you a domain name registered for one year and hosting for your account for 1 year as well as having a web site of up to three pages, designed and built to your guidelines.

To take advantage of this offer please go to the web site address below where you can fill in an application form. (You cannot get to this web page from the main menu.)

http://www.dawnweaver.co.uk/rp.asp

For further information contact:

Richard Jones

DawnWeaver Ltd., 49 Woodland Road , Norton Lees, Sheffield S8 8PD

Tel/fax: 0114 258 2055

Email: design@dawnweaver.co.uk