Consultations & Solutions:

• Website Design
• Hosting
• Email
• Spam Filtering
• Newsletters
• Creating PDFs
• Blogging
• Search Engine Optimization
• Gmail
• Surveys
• Postini
• Box Trapper
• Text Proofing & Editing
• Custom Input Forms
• Captcha Protected Input Forms

Your Advisor

If you're looking for someone to always be there for you to provide solutions for your website, you've come to the right place. Our clients come to think of us as their inhouse web team. We'll advise you every step of the way and then build a solution to meet your needs.

Here is some basic information that has been useful to many of our clients. For more details or a project consultation, please feel free to contact us directly.

Hosting Intro
Where to host your site can be a difficult question. You should be aware that many of the low-priced options can cause you all kinds of trouble. For most of my clients I recommend one of the two shared hosting companies below. Shared hosting means that other sites are hosted on the same server as your site. Managed hosting provides a higher level of hosting and security. Only your site is on the server. A dedicated server is another option you'll see but those typically do not come with any support. That is, you're providing the technical expertise yourself. Managed hosting gives you the dedicated server but with professional management of all technical aspects of hosting and email.

Shared Hosting
Bluehost.com is where many of our sites are hosted. (Disclosure: we do receive a one-time fee from Bluehost.com for referrals.) They offer excellent service and an incredible price. They cost about $130/year with a dedicated IP. They offer many features such as Postini, Wordpress, great stats, unlimited space, multiple sites hosted on one account, etc.

Eboundhost.com is a local (near Chicago, IL) hosting company. Because they're smaller than most hosts, they can offer very personalized service. They have packages under $100/year.

Managed Hosting
Rackspace.com or datapipe.com. Both are high-end reputable hosting providers. Rackspace claims 100% up time. They have specials that run as low as $299/month or $3,500/year. Datapipe starts at $420/month or $5,040/year. They both also offer colocation which means your site is hosted on more than one computer. If one system goes down, another kicks in. So, you're always in business. But they charge even more for that. They give you tons of space, bandwidth, and features.

Gmail
Many of my clients forward their email to Google's incredible free email service: Gmail. I've tested a number of email providers and none filter out the spam better then Gmail does. Within Gmail you can still setup your return address to reflect your company domain name: joe@yourdomain.com. You can import your contact lists, set up folders (which Gmail calls "labels"), create filters, forward multiple accounts to just one Gmail account, and much more. Let us set up your account for you.

POP Email
Bluehost.com provides a wide range of POP account features including SpamAssassin, Box Trapper, and Postini at a very affordable price. We recommend that you let us do the set up for you.

My Emma
We think that myemma.com offers the best online newsletter service. Their prices start around $30/month and go up from there depending on how many emails you send. Give us a call and we'll set up an account for you. We can import your existing mailing lists. Emma provides a rich feedback system for knowing whether or not your emails were opened, whether links were followed, or if an email address was invalid.

CutePDF
The Portable Document Format (PDF) is a file format created by Adobe for document exchange. It has become the standard format for sharing documents. CutePDF offers a free product that allows you to convert your Word documents to PDFs with one click.

WordPress
We recommend wordpress.com over blogger.com or some of the other free blogging services. Their basic service is free and both powerful and reliable.

TypePad
Typepad.com provides a higher end product for more complex and polished blogging. Pricing ranges from about $5/month to $90/month.