Once you have decided to create a web site, the most important part is the initial planning and organization. Although C&G Web will assist you in planning your web site, it is helpful to have a clear idea about what you hope to accomplish with your Web site and whom you wish to reach. Establishing this information before we start will help us develop a site that meets your expectations.

Here are some items that need to be addressed:

1. What type of web site do you want? Are you looking for:
   • A web site to promote your business
   • A replacement for brochures you currently send out to customers/clients
   • A forum for expressing your ideas about your field or area of interest
   • A new way of attracting customers/clients
   • A personal site as a place to distribute information about something in which you are interested
   • An e-commerce site allowing you to sell services and products
   • Etc...
   You might want a simple web site, consisting of only a few pages to promote your business and give you an Internet "presence". Or you might want a more complex web site to replace printed materials you have been providing in the past (e.g. printed catalogs). Or you may want a personal web site where you can distribute information about one of your hobbies.

2. If this is a new web site, what should be the domain name? (The domain name is what follows the "www.") You can use your company's name (if the domain name is not already in use) or use a word or words that summarize your service or product. If you will rely on advertising or promotion to bring in visitors, then using your company name makes the most sense. If you plan to bring in most new customers via search engines, then your primary service or product should be embedded in the domain. The domain name is one of the six criteria search engines check when they decide how high to rank you in a search. For some search engines it makes the difference between a high ranking and a low one.

3. How should the information be categorized? People have short attention spans when they are on the Internet. Making your message quick and easy to read is essential. To make an immediate clear impression means you have to categorize your information, services or products into easy-to-understand categories that will load quickly. We will guide you to not overwhelm any one category with too many graphics or words. We create your navigation system to directly reflect the categories you use to communicate your message.

4. Your Graphic Choices. For some customers, like retailers, this is a challenging step. Picking 100 SKU's from an inventory of 3000 items from 400 vendors can take time. We work from photographs, disks, e-mailed JPGs, transparencies, or brochure material. Many of our web site are created from vendor catalog sheets. Processing graphics is the most time consuming step when creating most web sites. Tightening up contrast, cleaning up the color, deleting unrelated material, and dropping out backgrounds (to decrease loading time) often takes fifteen minutes per graphic. For many sites, the number of graphics will determine the cost of your site.

5. Choosing Your Content. We do not charge for text if you transmit it to us electronically. We just lift it from a disk or e-mail and drop it into your site. Copy for the web should be short, clear, concise and easy-to-read.

Once the site is built, we can install it either on your server or on one of ours. For more information, see the web site hosting page.