Answers to your questions:

The best way to familiarize yourself with a web designer's work is to spend time at their website. As you review the work of a web design company, ask yourself:

• Do links work throughout the site?
• Are the graphical images and photos in focus?

• Do the images load quickly or is there a lag?
• Is the idea behind the design original or does it look like a template?
• Can you view the web designer's client list or portfolio?
• Can you find the web designer's website in the search engines?
• Can you find their clients' sites online using a keyword search?

It's not just about the price — it's also about originality in concept and successful search engine placement. Research their ranking and review their client designs. If you like what you see then you have winner on your hands!

With the advent of do-it-yourself HTML software, it is relatively simple for anyone to create a functional website. We all know someone who designs websites as a sideline using DIY web design software. This also explains why there are so many poorly designed websites — if someone wields a paintbrush, he is not Van Gogh!

Consider the following scenario: You're convinced that anyone can design a website so you hire your nephew (he has a copy of FrontPage he'd like to try) or you hire an employee's relative who "creates websites in her spare time".

The result: Your website does not have the professional look that is evident in your other marketing pieces so the first impression might not be a positive one. The navigation might be cumbersome and the pages might take too long to load, causing people to leave your website without contacting you.

The real problem: From their first impression, website visitors do not take your business seriously and they choose to take their business to your competitor.

Web design is a unique medium that requires marketing knowledge of what works on the Internet. The optimization of each page for the search engines is ongoing since all of the search engines change their algorithms and indexing methods regularly, requiring continuous research and tweaks.

Properly marketing a site online continues long after the launch of the site and, again, online promotion requires a lot of time, of which you might have very little to spare!

Hiring a professional web design team will save you time and money in the long run and bring you the results you need for online marketing.

We have very reasonable prices and believe that any small business should be able to afford their own website. The factors that determine the ultimate cost include: the number of pages you want built, if you will sell products or services on your website, what kind of graphic work involved, and how interactive your website will be.

You will also need a domain name and a host. You may need email addresses and help setting up your email software. If you don't already have a domain name, we'd love to help you choose one and help you register it. We provide very reasonable hosting services that include email addresses and help setting up your email software.

When you hire us to design and develop your website, you are adding a professional to your team. Our basic website packages include: page layout, image and logo manipulation, transfer of your pages to a host and submission to the search engines and directories using the META tags the web designer formatted. Our mission is flexibility. We'll customize a package for you or work on an hourly basis.

The Blue Sky e-Solutions design team offers package pricing so you know up front what your website project will cost. One-time manual search engine submission is included in our set price.

The length of time from your initial meeting with us to the launch of your website is determined by the number of pages you are going live with, the complexity of your site design, and how long it takes you to gather and organize the content for your website. Most sites can go live within a week once you have approved the design prototype and provided all of the content.

We would love to help you keep your website updated. We can customize a package for you or work on an hourly basis.

We can also build you a website that you enabled for easy updates that you can do on your own. There are many tools available that help make updating easy. Let us know if this is something you would like to pursue.

URL is the abbreviation for "universal resource locator." This is the address typed in to view your webpage on the Internet. For example, you entered http://www.blueskyesolutions.com to access our home page.

If you do not already have a domain name registered, we would love to help you with this step.

Web hosting is a monthly or annual fee that you pay to have your site accessible on the Internet. We can help you choose affordable options that meets your needs.

SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization and all of our websites are designed with search engine placement in mind. That means your website will rank well in a keyword search on search engines like Google, MSN and Yahoo, to name a few.

Search engines change their algorithms and indexing methods regularly, requiring continuous research and education on the part of your web designer. Your site is designed with optimization in mind; however, it will require tweaks to maintain its search engine placement.

Some web designers do not submit your website once it is finished and online, or they might charge you an extra fee to provide this service just once. Your website has to be manually submitted to the search engines.

As web designers, our job is to build unique websites for our clients but this is really only 50% of our job. Our efforts can continue long after the launch of your website. Blue Sky e-Solutions offers an optional aggressive search engine service for one year, which ensures that your website remains indexed.

Every page should have three META tags in the header of your website: Title, Description and Keywords. META tags are an important part of your page which allows your website to be found by search engines and directories when someone performs a search. You should never have to pay extra for META tags.

All of our clients rank very high on the search engines in their preferred focus area. We do not subscribe to any type of tricks, magic or gimmicks. We build honest, content-rich websites that incorporate today's search engine technology.

You can view META tag formatting on any website on the Internet by viewing the HTML source code on the web page. If you're using Internet Explorer, visit the home page of your website. Click on View / Source and your Notepad program will launch with the HTML source code in text format. You should be able to see at least three tags in the top <HEAD> tag - Title, Description, and Keywords.

Maintenance is a fee paid monthly to keep your site updated with new content that you provide. Most good websites have new content updated regularly. Fresh content is what will keep your visitors coming back. We can set you up on an hourly rate or a monthly rate depending on your needs.

We are located in Harrisonburg, Virginia. We've built many websites for clients in the Shenandoah Valley but also have several clients in out of state as well. By using the Internet, email and the telephone, it is possible to communicate effectively with clients in any location.