Having your own domain name, e.g.

<www.yourbusiness.com> - or -
<www.yourorganization.org> - or even -
<town.yourtown.yourstate.us>,
can make your web site’s address easier to remember, and the site itself easier for people to find. (There is also a certain degree of status involved.) It also comes at a price, although that price is small, and many find it a worthwhile investment. Other Top Level Domains (besides .com and .org) that are available for general use include .net, .biz, .info, and .us.

Without your own domain name, the address for your web site (known as a Uniform Resource Locator, or URL for short) will take the form of

<www.yourserversname.com/yourname/>, - or even -
<www.yourserversname.com/~yourname/>.

Domain names are issued on a first come, first served basis, and many of the more common names, particularly those ending in ‘.com’ and ‘.net,’ used for commercial sites, have already been taken. There is still available a much greater selection of ‘.org’ names for organizations and societies. Even more under-utilized are the ‘.us’ domains, which have now been made available for general use, as well as for towns, cities, counties, states, and special districts, libraries, councils of government, schools, museums, and suchlike. Mashwebdesign.com can check whether the name you desire is available, or you can check for yourself by going to the InterNIC Whois web site (or the .US Whois for .us URLs.)

Domain name registration costs from $10.00 to $35.00 per year, depending on who you register with and how many years you pay at a time. Mashwebdesign.com helps you in finding the affordable registrar that charges less per year, payable annually in advance. Most Web Presence Providers also charge a one-time setup fee and/or a monthly maintenance fee.  Mashwebdesign.com can handle all the hassle of setting up your own domain name for you, at negligible cost.

If you have a clear idea of what you want in a web site, including all textual content, photographs, and logos, Mashwebdesign.com can provide a fixed price quote for designing your web site. If you aren’t exactly sure of what you want, or want to build up your web site slowly as your budget permits, you are probably better off going with our standard hourly rates. We can also provide a “Not to exceed” estimate for various phases of the design process. (We usually manage to stay under the not-to-exceed figure.)

A basic, one page web site consisting of a logo and background, plus basic information — “This is who we are,” “This is where we are,” and “This is what we do” — can be created in as little as two to three hours. Additional pages, particularly those containing predominantly textual material and in the same artistic style as the first, or “home” page, typically take an hour or less per page. Pages containing large amounts of graphics images or tabular data can take considerably longer. Providing text and images already in digital format (e.g. as email attachments) can save time on setup and data entry, thereby reducing costs.

Design Service
Web design, page layout  for Business      $15.00 / hour,   for Non-Profit Organization      $5.00 / hour

Graphics design, photo scanning

for Business         $20.00 / hour,   for Non-Profit Organization        $5.00 / hour

CGI scripting, database design

$20.00 / hour for Business,  $10.00 / hour for Non-Profit Organization.

Web Site Hosting

$80.00 / year    for Business,      $50.00 / year  for Non-Profit Organization.
Domain Name Registration

$10.00 / year   for business,       $10.00 / year for Non-Profit Organization.
Domain Name Parking

$12.00 / year  for Business,          $12.00 / year for Non-Profit Organization.
Domain Name Setup Fee

$5.00 - one time only  for Business,          $5.00 - one time only for Non-Profit Organization

POP3 mail boxes

$5.00 / year (each)  for Business         $0.00 / year (each) for Non-Profit Organization

You can, and many people do. However, few do it well. Imagine that you are laying out an advertisement for a printed page — only you don’t know how large the page will be, and you don’t know what size of type your customer will see. It could be printed on a 5½” by 8½” sheet of note paper or a full sized sheet of newsprint. It could be printed in 8-point type (like this) or in 20 point type for the visually impaired (like this). Web site designers confront this problem with every site they design. Computer monitors vary in resolution from 640 by 480 pixels to 2048 by 1536 pixels — more than a 3 to 1 range (WebTV® viewers are restricted to 576 pixels), and not everybody surfs with their browser maximized to full screen (I don’t). Most web browsers also let the user select font sizes over at least a 4 to 1 range.

Needless to say, what looks perfect on your computer screen might look hideous or virtually unreadable on someone else’s. Mashwebdesign.com will design your web site so that it looks good — or at least readable — on every visitor’s screen.

Nearly every word processor, spreadsheet, and database program available has an HTML (HyperText Markup Language) save option, and there are numerous graphical WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) web site editors on the market (e.g. Microsoft® FrontPage®, Adobe Dreamweaver). Unfortunately, good web site design does not lend itself well to automated approaches, and without extensive knowledge and experience in HTML and CSS design, the use of these programs is more likely than not to produce sites that look acceptable on only one or a very few computer screens, or which are viewable on only one brand or version of browser. What you see may be what you get, but not necessarily what everyone else gets.

Mashwebdesign.com does not employ such tools, preferring to use only tools that produce tight, clean pages optimized for all viewers and the fastest access possible.

Web site prices range from free to over half a million dollars. Free web sites are generally paid for by advertising, and require the inclusion of large banner ads on the client’s pages. They also generally require that creation and maintenance be performed by the owner. Mashwebdesign.com does do free web sites, but we can be surprisingly affordable if it is a big website.

Most clients who contract with small web designers like Mashwebdesign.com don’t understand, or even do not want to understand, the nuances of web design techniques, and may be unaware of many of the features that a web site can provide to benefit their business or organization. As a result, the time required to design a site that optimally serves their needs can be quite unpredictable, and the design objectives are apt to change as site development proceeds. For this reason, Mashwebdesign.com prefers not to quote a flat rate unless the potential client has very specific design goals in mind.

Most sites designed by Mashwebdesign.com cost less for a basic 2 to 3 page site with no interactive features to a few thousand dollars for a large site with lots of images, interactive submit forms, databases, and/or dynamic content.

Mashwebdesign.com also has a number of prepared scripts, such as an announcements form, a customer information request form, a guestbook, or a password protection management system, which can be adapted for a specific web site in only a few hours. Pages can be dynamically generated from a standardized template file (as these pages were generated), allowing updates and additions to be done with a minimum of time and labor, and quick and easy changes made to the site’s overall layout and “look and feel.”