Lab 99: Affordable, Professional Websites

Small Business Website Package

Every business needs a website. And with a good–looking, professionally created website from Lab 99, your business will stand out from the crowd.

Our Small Business Package includes everything you need to get your business online, all for just £299:

• a website of up to 10 pages;
• the first two years’ .co.uk domain name, or the first year’s .com domain name;
• and the first year’s hosting for your website.

Your Top–Quality Website

A unique, good–looking and user–friendly design comes as standard. If you have a logo, we will gladly incorporate it into the design.

We will include a contact form — an essential feature of a modern website. If you want your customers to find your premises, we can include an interactive Google map on your contact details page at no extra cost.

Search engine optimisation is included, to get your website as high in the rankings as possible. Our use of modern, efficient code to achieve this has other benefits too: the pages will load quickly, and the site will be accessible to visitors with disabilities. In addition, we will submit your website to all the main search engines.

Your Domain Name

A domain name, such as microsoft.com, is what identifies your website to the outside world. If you don’t yet have a domain name, we will include the first year’s registration of a .com name, or the first two years’ registration of a .co.uk name.

Your Web Hosting

A website is essentially a collection of electronic documents. To make it available for everyone to see via the internet, the website needs to be stored, or ‘hosted’, on a specially configured computer. With our Small Business Package, the first year’s hosting is included.

This gives you, among other things:

• an unlimited number of email addresses based on your domain name;
• a password–protected control panel, so that you can read and write emails securely online;
• two statistics services, so that you can see how many visitors your website has had, where they come from, and more;
• all the storage space and bandwidth that your website requires;
• an unlimited number of MySQL databases;
• all the other technical features needed to make your website work, such as the Perl programming language.

As a bonus, each Small Business Package qualifies for half–price hosting after the free first year: we normally charge £100 per year, but we guarantee that you will pay no more than £50 per year.

Optional Extras

Our Small Business Package includes all the features a typical small business website needs, and more. And all for just £299!

Other features are available for a one–off small extra charge. For example:

• We can create an image gallery to display a series of photographs with a stylish slideshow effect. This normally costs between £20 and £50, depending on the number of images in the gallery.
• If you want to sell products through your website, we can incorporate online payment by Paypal or Google Checkout. The cost of this will vary according to the number of products offered for sale, but will usually be between £20 and £100.
• If you need to be able to update the website yourself, we can build the website around a piece of software known as a content management system. This gives you password–protected access to the backstage area of the website, and allows anyone with basic computer skills to change portions of text or upload pictures. This typically adds between £100 and £200 to the cost, depending on how much of the website you need to be able to update.

Most things are possible, so if you have a special requirement, please feel free to contact us.

Running Costs

A one–off fee of £299 covers everything for the first year, but what happens after that? Most web design companies tend to keep quiet about the running costs, but we prefer to be honest.

There are three things you may have to pay for after the first year:

• Guaranteed half–price web hosting: £50 per year.
• The domain name: a .co.uk domain name costs £25 for two years, and a .com domain name costs £30 per year (they are administered by different organisations, hence the different terms and prices).
• Any changes you ask us to make to your website. We are normally happy to make occasional minor alterations, such as changing a few words here and there, free of charge. For substantial updates and alterations, we charge £20 per hour.

So What Do I Do Now?

1. Decide what information you want to be displayed on your website.
2. Contact us. Tell us what you want, and discover what we can do for you.
3. Write the text and assemble any pictures you need. We are happy to offer advice and to edit and rewrite text to make it suitable for the web.
4. Send us the material. Digital documents, sent by email or on a CD, are best (especially for photographs), but paper copies are fine too.
5. We will take care of the rest:
   • designing and building your website;
   • organising the material;
   • presenting the material efficiently both to humans and search engines;
   • and arranging your domain name and hosting.

Most Lab 99 websites are up and running within two weeks of our receipt of the material!