A great first impression is a lasting impression.  Your web site is your first impression to many potential clients. We can develop a user-friendly, attractive, and helpful web site to support and increase your business—a complex process—and we love doing it!

Most businesses are expert in their own services, but have little expertise in web design, writing for the web, or web usability. That's where we come in. We manage the web design process for you, using your expertise about your customers and your business, plus our web development skills and the many tools we have available, to design a web site that supports your business goals.

Your web site is an extension of your business, and because of this we encourage our clients to take web maintenance very seriously. If you prefer, we can manage all your web maintenance, based on your input. If you want to maintain your site yourself, we will design it with this in mind, such that you can maintain it with your current tools and skills.

We also design web sites using Joomla!™, a very popular content management system which allows anyone you designate to update content without special software.

Once your web site is "live", visitors to your web site will form an opinion about your business based on the look and usefulness of your web site—this is your great opportunity to shine! Your maintenance plan should address how you will keep all information on your web site current and correct and who will follow-up on every email or form submitted to your business.

If you gave web users the option to sign up for a newsletter (a great tool to keep clients and potential clients informed about your business), then be sure to send them a professional newsletter as promised! Finally, decide who will review monthly web statistics, and continuously adapt your web site content to improve these stats.

We can help you with all your web maintenance tasks.  However, regardless of who maintains your site, it is important that you "own" your web site content and features and continue to make it useful for you and your clients!

The frequency of updates to any web site varies, based on the type of business. However, every business should review all web pages at least once weekly.

Once you have a web site, web hosting allows you to publish your web site — web hosting is what allows the world to see your web site on the internet.

Whether you want to host your small business web site, deploy a content management system (e.g. Joomla!™ hosting), host a blog, or setup your own discussion forum, we have a hosting plan that will meet your needs. You can host with us knowing that your site will have the performance you expect and that certified engineers are on hand to assist as needed.

Our clients share space on our Managed Virtual Server (MVS), a self-contained and isolated virtualized environment running its own operating system install, web server, mail server and other core services. Unlike with  shared hosting plans, with RF Web Design hosting you are not sharing core services with anyone else but our clients, and we manage our accounts very closely.

We offer three different hosting packages, depending on the size of your business and the amount of data storage you require for your web files and email accounts. The majority of our clients (business and individual) require only the RF Personal package::

Perhaps you don't desire or need a web site, but you do need a more professional email address... JSmith @ hotmail.com just doesn't provide the same business impression as JSmith @ MyBusiness.com. To remedy this, we offer email (only) hosting that allows you to use a personalized domain name. We help you select an available domain name that reflects your business name or type of business, then set up your email account(s) using this domain name.

We offer three different hosting packages, depending on the size of your business and the amount of data storage you require for your email accounts. The majority of our clients (business and individual) require only the RF Personal package:

New for 2010, Really Fine Web Design introduces Email Marketing to our line up of services!  Interested? Contact Vicky at This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it , or call her at (910)692-9080.

I use and recommend Ratepoint for Email Marketing.  They make it easy to comply with the CAN-SPAM Act.  They also provide Online Surveys and Customer Feedback.  If you are considering adding any of these services to your current advertising and marketing strategies, give me a call and I'll explain why I choose Ratepoint over Constant Contact, Mail Chimp, and iContact.  If you want, I can also help you create your newsletters and surveys, or provide coaching to your employees who are responsible for these areas.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) consists of using a combination of techniques to tell search engines (think Google, Yahoo! Search, Dogpile, Excite, etc.) about the content and value of your web pages. Search engines are designed to find the page that best satisfies the searcher's goals. Giving the right information to search engines, in the way they will best understand it, increases the probability that potential clients will quickly find your web site!

The basic tasks of SEO, which we incorporate into each web design project, include these items...

• Use only well-formed xhtml
• Appropriate use of xhtml tags and properties, and CSS
• Use text-based navigation
• Design a user-friendly site: easy navigation, pertinent topics, visually appealing
• Plan so that each page has unique content
• Write easy-to-read content that is valuable to the reader
• Include top keyword phrases in the anchor text of your outbound and inbound links
• Work with our clients to obtain relevant inbound links
• Update the web site regularly with new content
• ...and more!

The field of SEO is huge and complex, and there are many ways to analyze your existing web site and your competition's sites. This information, and various SEO tools, can be used to improve the placement of your web page in search engine results.

We've all dealt with it to varying degrees.  Spam.  It clogs our inbox, displays words we really don't want to see, even occasionally pretends it is YOU when sending spam to others.  We hate it. There are a variety of ways you can limit spam, such as filters on your home/office email software and email filtering at the web server.  We've tested a variety of these in assisting clients to minimize spam email.  To date, the best solution we've found overall is Google Apps.

Google Apps is much more than an email filtering service, but it does include Google's Gmail email system, which provide excellent spam filtering.  There are several advantages of using Google Apps for email filtering protection:

• You keep your domain name as part of your email address (for example: " This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it ")
• For small businesses (under 50 email users) the Google Apps service is free (there are also paid versions availalbe, but the free version provides the same email filtering capabilities)
• Setup costs for implementing Google Apps generally cost less than one year's worth of other email fitering services, providing cost savings over time
• Each user receives 25 GB of email and IM storage (50 times the industry average)
• Users can tap into Gmails extensive advantages, or can use their existing computer-based email software
• Users can check Gmail's Spam folder to review filtered messages, without ever downloading these onto their computers

Interested?  You can learn more about Google Apps at http://www.google.com/apps/

Contact us to assist you in implemenitng Google Apps for your business!