On designquote.net, I selected the services I provide to my ecommerce clients and came up with -

Small Company or Freelancer
DesignQuote Budget:
$5,000 – $7,500

Seriously?

Other companies from small to large charge, for example, $2500 for a basic ecommerce site (no graphic design), $3300 for a custom ecommerce site with no extra SEO, $3499 for a 15 page site with no ecommerce. Another site suggests that ecommerce sites should start at $5000 and can go up to $20,000.

Consider that a full ecommerce website client gets all this -

Professional, custom web design with revisions
Full featured website (CMS)/ecommerce system with mals-e integration and set up
Database development
SEO including meta tags and Google Analytics integration
Lifetime support for the CMS/ecommerce system

I do not charge my clients for time spent emailing them.
I do not charge for revisions during the initial design process.
I charge a flat rate which is always to the advantage to the client. This means if your design needs an extra 5 hours to get it perfect, it’s included – you’re not shelling out a few hundred extra bucks (or more!) because you didn’t like the initial draft.
I do not work in an office which means 2 things – I don’t have to pass the cost of running said office onto the client, and I can work as much as I need to. I’m available by email 7 days a week.
I require only a 50% deposit to start.

All this for much less than the lowest prices I could find.

The main reason I’m posting this information is because starting in January, I’ll be taking a full course load, plus homeschooling 3 of my 4 kids, plus working as much as I can fit in there – you might image that I’m already busy now, I’ll be 2 or 3 times busier then. So I will be limiting my work to one client at a time. At this time, I normally have 3-5 at any given time!

I’m on the lookout for more great clients all the time (I have so many now, but I can never have enough – these people are awesome)!Just know coming in January, there will be a waiting list, first come, first served. If I have a client at the time you email me, your email will go on the list. I’ll start at the top of the list and if you’re still interested when I’m available, we can begin right away. Remember this doesn’t start until January 2010, so I can start on your project anytime through the middle of December!

Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, flickr… if you haven’t heard of any of those, you’ve been living under a rock. Welcome to 2009.

Social networking is a way to get your name, and your business’ name, out into the world. More than free advertising, if you spend just a few minutes a day networking, it gives potential customers a look at who you are. Like the “good old days” when the butcher would gab at his customers about their families and town business, but with a wider audience. People like to know who they are buying from or getting services from, but in the days of Made in China and Wal-Mart, it’s not a common occurrence to know anything real about the company or people who run it. Social networking websites let you give a real face to your business, and customers will respond.

It’s best if you have a website where you can link your networking profiles to and from, but even if you don’t, they will help bring people, and sales, in.

Where to start?
First, a valid email address. You’ll have activation emails to attend to, and potential customers who may contact you, so use an email when networking that you check often (and can rely on to deliver your email, I’m seeing many people with crappy ISP emails that never see any mail in their inbox).

Start with just a couple websites. Everyone is on Facebook. Chances are, when you sign up, you’ll be shown a list of people in your email contact list who are already there. You can also search for people by name or email address. Twitter about happenings with yourself and your business. Just made a batch of product, updated your blog, opened your store, are running a sale? Tell people about it! Once you’re comfortable with those, add on LinkedIn, MySpace, etc.

Make sure all your profiles contain a link to your website and/or blog, and link your website back to your profiles. In previous posts about SEO(1)(2)(3), I mentioned link backs – the links to your site from Facebook, LinkedIn, all of them, count as link backs! It will help your rankings.

If you have a blog, update it regularly so people finding your site have current news to look at – it makes your site, and your business, look more “cared for”.

A word of caution, stay professional unless you know the people you’re talking with online. The potential to get a bad name online is high and one bad review can come up high in search results for your business.

Basic website information
Photos and other images should be high quality, high resolution. Images can be resized to 72 dpi but otherwise left full size and I will modify them as needed for the pages they go on. Images need to be marked/labeled so I know what page they go on. Renaming the image file “homepage1.jpg” for example, or providing a list (image1.jpg goes on main page, etc) is a big time saver. Text can be written into the email itself, or in a Word or pdf file.

• Home page text and images
• About us page text and images
• Content page text
  • Address, phone numbers, alternate emails, do you want a map to your location? What form fields do you want in your contact form? Common ones include Name, Email, Phone, and a Comments/Questions section, but you can request any other information you want.
• Other page text and images
• Hosting information – account/ftp information

eCommerce site information

• I typically add your initial products to your website, so unless you prefer to do it youself after it goes live, I need product photos, description, options (like if it comes in different sizes, colors, etc), price, and weight if you ship by weight. Product photos can be resized to 72dpi.
• I need to do the initial set up of Mals-e to hook it up with my system
  • I will need your PayPal, merchant account or other payment processor information. Depending on how you accept payments, this will differ.
  • I will also set up the shipping and tax information, so I need to know your shipping rates and how much sales tax to charge, and to who (if applicable).

Search engine optimization
I will need your title, description and keyword information. I can help you with this, but read on to learn more about them…

First, how do you want to be found through search engines? “Florida candles”, “homemade soda”, “Nevada seamstress”, etc.

Now consider search engine results. When you type in a search, the results are given like this, which are hidden meta tags in your website’s code:

Your title is very important. It has to be relevant to what your business/website is about. If you cater to a specific group, like brides, and sell a specific product, like custom shoes, and have a retail store in a specific area, you’ll want your website title to look something like: Custom bridal shoes :: Serving brides in the City, State area.

The description is more helpful for the user doing the search, but the search engines do look at it for relevant information. If you leave your description meta tag out, the first text on your website will be displayed and it might not reflect your site as good as it could to the user.

Last for meta tags (but not least for SEO), is keywords. A list of words or short phrases, relevent to your website. For the bridal shoe example above, a list like: bride, bridal, wedding, pumps, high heels, flats, city, surrounding cities, state, retail store street, etc.

All of that though is second place to your website content and link backs. Search engines look into your code and place your site in the results based on the amount of high quality content and coding, and how many good standing websites are linking to yours. My job is to make sure your website’s code is up to standards, and your website’s content is the best it can be, but you will need to list, or have listed, your site by other websites. D

DO NOT let services that promise “top google placement” touch your website or place links. Bad linking and bad coding (using link farms or hidden text/links, among other tricks) can and does cause your website to become banned from Google and other search engines. It takes time to get good results. 2-8 weeks just to show up on Google and months to get placed higher in the results. It is worth it to be patient!

2. Do have tons of related content. Content is King. And Queen, Princess, Prince, the whole dang court. Other SEO methods (meta tags, etc) are the peasants, still needed to run a kingdom but search engines don’t notice them as much. If you do a search for nearly anything on Google, you’ll notice one thing in common with all the top sites: lots and lots of relevant text.

3. Don’t do flashing, scrolling, required downloads, pop ups – anything that can be construed as annoying, or worse, not work on the visitor’s browser.

4. Don’t use music, or have it off to allow the visitor to play it. You don’t want a potential client to get fired when your website’s music comes blasting out of work speakers they didn’t know were on, nor would you want it waking up a baby. Music is very similar to Flash…use it wisely or not at all.

5. Do have quality design and coding – I can’t stress enough the effect of good design and coding to a business. Your visitors are more likely to come and stay if your site looks good (holds visual appeal) and has easy to find content. The back end coding (html, css, etc) is equally important – websites that use current standards are more favorably looked upon by search engines.

6. Do blog – and blog regularly. I highly recommend a self hosted WordPress Blog (like I’m using right now!) that can be customized to match your site, or BE your site. Google loves blog posts. Your site visits will improve dramatically if you post regularly and give readers and the search engines something to keep coming back to.

One of our computers was infected with a lovely gem of a product called “WinWeb Security” – not affiliated with winweb.com, this is a program the installs itself and pretends to be an antivirus program, telling you your computer is infected with a wide variety of issues. When you attempt to use the program, you are only able to if you pay $49.99. Unfortunately, this program does NOT clean up your computer, it actually installs vicious trogans, spyware and viruses and royally screws the computer and user up.

After spending 6 hours last night and 4 hours this morning fixing this problem (my personal/work computer is pretty darn secure so I don’t have a lot of experience with these things!), I am compelled to write a post to assist anyone else having this problem.

Symptoms of the problem: Unable to visit any spyware removal websites, unable to install or run any removal or anti virus programs, popups saying you are infected, pop ups that appear to be advertising pop ups (even using Firefox), Google search results not going to the actual website but to go.google.com/example, and the WinWeb “Security” program icon/window on your computer. There may be others but those are the main ones I experienced.

How this happened: Lax security on your computer most likely. The computer involved (not my own) had the Firewall disabled and someone who was not the normal user went to a variety of ….. bad ….. websites, without that without firewall in place, the program was able to easily infect many areas of the hard drive.

How to fix it: Basically, 3 main things: Firewall your computer, get a (free) antivirus program, and a (free) malware removal program. This isn’t going to cost you anything if you are a Windows user. 2 websites (listed below in references) were instrumental in assisting me get rid of this problem, and if you are infected, you won’t be able to view the websites, so I will link them but give the run down on how I fixed it, which will also streamline the process. Expect to spend hours on this, but it’ll be boring so have a book or knitting handing.

Step 1. Make sure your Firewall is ACTIVE.  In XP with the classic menu, Start>Settings>Control Panel>WIndows Firewall. Make sure it is on, then go to the exceptions tab and uncheck anything you don’t recognize. If you are unable to get to a website or play a game (make sure it’s a honest site!), you can go back and recheck as needed. Then in the Control Panel, go to Add/Remove Programs and uninstall WinWeb Security if it is there (it wasn’t in mine)

Step 2. Go to downloads.com and download Avira AntiVir Personal Install, but don’t run yet (disable it if it tries to run, as well as any other virus checkers). Now download Malwarebytes Anti-Malware. Install this program, and allow an icon to be placed on your desktop. Right click on the Malwarebytes icon and select Properties, then click on the Find Target button. A window will open with the icon highlighted. Right click on this icon and rename it to *anything* (I named mine lalalala), then launch it by double clicking it. WinWeb is VERY sneaky and makes these programs not work. By renaming it, it will run.

Step 3. With Malwarebytes open, select Quick Scan first, before anything else. It’ll take a while, get the book or knitting out. Let it quarantine the files it finds, delete them, then restart your computer. When it’s back up, run Malwarebytes again, but go to the Update tab and update the program. Do another Quick Scan, restart again. Repeat one more time.

Step 4. With the computer restarted, you’re still going to have WinWeb trying to get into your computer’s pants. Deleting virus ridden registry entries is next. Go to Start>Run and in the space provided, type “regedit” – without the “” quotes of course – and a window will come up with all your computer’s registry files. There are 3 to remove (I only had 2 of them, but make sure anyway):

1. HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{D5DF7C9D-6069-4552-8B0C-D02A912FC889}
2. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\Browser Helper Objects\{D5DF7C9D-6069-4552-8B0C-D02A912FC889}
3. HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Run “WinwebSecurity”

For example, to remove number 1, find and open the HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT folder, then find and open the CLSID folder, the find the {D5DF7C9D-6069-4552-8B0C-D02A912FC889} folder (easiest way is to look for the D5D and make sure the ending is the 889). Don’t open this folder, just right click and delete the whole thing. Do the same with number 2 and 3. Restart your computer.

Step 5. Run Malwarebytes but do a Full Scan time, then run the Avira program. Update the program if it asks you to, then let it run. You need to stick close because each time it finds an infection it’ll ask you what to do with it (select quarantine). Once this program is done, go to the administation tab>quarantine and delete all the quarnatined files, then restart your computer. You should now be WinWeb free. If you aren’t, shoot me an email and I’ll see if I can help, but only if you’ve ALREADY done everything listed here, or are willing to bring me your computer and pay me to fix it!

References:

http://www.bleepingcomputer.com/malware-removal/remove-winweb-security

http://forums.cnet.com/5208-6132_102-0.html?forumID=32&threadID=300720&start=0&tag=forum-w;forums06

http://www.download.com/Avira-AntiVir-Personal-Free-Antivirus/3000-2239_4-10322935.html?tag=mncol

http://www.malwarebytes.org/

2. Start Photoshop.

3. Go to Window>Actions. Leave the actions window open.

4. Open just one of the horizontal (wide) images you want to resize.

5. Create a New Action

6. Name this action as below

7. Hit Record and make sure you don’t do anything outside these instructions, or it’ll get recorded too.

8. Go to Image>Image Size

10. Go to File> Save then enter a quality of 6 to 8, but no higher. Click OK.

11. Now just go to the bottom of the actions window and hit the very left box to Stop Recording.

12. You’ll now see your “resize” action in the actions window

Now, start at #4 but open a vertical/tall photo from that folder. The changes you make are in naming the action like in Step 6, but this time it is resize 600px tall and in step 9, first change the resolution to 72, then change the Height to 600.

Batch editing

Go to File>Automate

In this Batch window, select the action you want to use. Go down to Source, make sure Folder is selected and click the Choose Button. Find the Horizontal folder you made, then go to destination, make sure Folder is selected, then click the Choose button and select the folder you want the resized images to go in (a 3rd new folder is a good idea).

Click ok and wait a really long time while Photoshop runs the processes. When that batch is done, do the same thing, but choose the tall photo action, and the Vertical folder.

Once all the images are resized, you can add them all to the same folder and rename it whatever you want, like “thompson family portraits” or whatever.