Features and FAQs
What is SiteWorks Express?
SiteWorks Express is a low cost alternative to an expensive agency designed custom website. SiteWorks Express websites are designed or enhanced by professional web designers, feature a full
content management
system, unlimited pages, a form building tool and more. The typical time to deploy a SiteWorks Express website is about 4 weeks.
CLICK HERE for more information on the CMS.
How Much Does SiteWorks Express Cost?
SiteWorks Express Base - starting at $3,995 plus $19.95/month hosting.
See our pricing page for more pricing details and options.
What DO I Get With SiteWorks Express?
Base pricing for ALL SiteWorks Express packages includes:
- A design created or modified by a professional website designer. SiteWorks Express is NOT based on templates. We use your logo, your photos and your input to create a custom design. Prior to starting any design work, we have you complete a comprehensive questionnaire that gives our designers the information they need to tailor the design for you and your business. We then create a great design & tweak it based on your feedback. See the section below for design limitations.
- A powerful WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) Content Management System (CMS). Our SiteWorks CMS allows non-technical users to add web pages, edit web pages, and build forms using only a web browser. No HTML programming is required (although, you "techies" will be happy to know that you can edit the source code.) Click here for a screen shot of our CMS.
- Unlimited website pages. We will create the website pages using the site map you provide in the questionnaire. From there you can add as many pages as you'd like. In web pages, you can add images, text, build tables, add documents for download, and much more.
- "Friendly URLs". Create landing pages with easy to remember addresses. Combine this with Google Analytics for a powerful direct marketing tracking system.
- Dynamic navigation. SiteWorks allows you to add and edit links in the website navigation scheme. You can also add as many links as you'd like to other pages in the website, to documents for download (Word, PDF, Excel, PowerPoint), and to any external website.
- FormWorks form building tool. You can easily create forms that email the form responses, or save the form responses in a database for download in CSV format. CSV format can be imported into may popular programs such as Excel or Access.
- Automatic site map. Each time you add or delete a page, the site map will automatically update. The site map is typically linked somewhere in the website navigation and is critical for search engines to index your website.
- Edit META data for Search Engine Optimization. The CMS editor allows you to edit the page title and the keywords and description META tags. You can also control the image ALT tags in all indexable content.
- Google Analytics. Powerful real-time website traffic statistics.
- Powerful options that you can purchase at extra cost. We have many affordable options we can add on at any time, and we are constantly adding new features and upgrades. Because you may not need all the bells and whistles, we keep the base pricing low and allow you to pick and choose the options you want and need. See our pricing page for optional features and costs.
What DON'T I Get With SiteWorks Express?
SiteWorks Express base pricing
DOES NOT include:
- Multiple Website Designs - to keep your costs down, we will provide a single custom design based on your answers to our comprehensive questionnaire. We will then provide one round of tweaks to the design based on your feedback. We can make major design modifications or start a new design from scratch at additional cost. See the pricing page for details.
- Information Architecture. IA is the process of discovery that high end agencies provide to define how the website will work, how it will navigate and what content it will provide. With SiteWorks Express we ask you to do the IA work. It's really not that hard - we have a questionnaire that you will complete that will give us the information we need to create the primary and global navigation for the website. We can provide basic IA work as an optional cost. See our pricing page for more information.
- Unlimited Content Load. One of the most time consuming and costly tasks of building a website is adding the content - we call this "content load". The hardest part of content load is the time it takes to write the content. Once it's written it has to be added to the website. With each package we include 4 hours (approximately 8 pages) of content load. We then train you how to add or edit content so you can do the rest. If you prefer not to create or load content we can provide affordable copy writing and content load services - see our pricing page for more info.
- A New Logo. Our pricing includes a professional website design that assumes you already have a logo. We can provide a logo design at an additional cost. Please contact us for details on logo pricing.
- Various Optional Features. We can make your SiteWorks Express site more powerful with the addition of features such as a site search engine, a Flash slide show, and more. See our pricing page for more info.
How Can You Do This?
By using our
SiteWorks website framework, we can deploy a website foundation and content management system in much less time than it takes to build websites in the traditional way. SiteWorks is a system we've been developing and refining for years. It's based on time tested code that we are constantly upgrading and enhancing.
We also hire experienced, talented website designers who know website design inside and out, and who can create a truly custom design, tailored to your business, quickly and efficiently. We only charge for extra design time if you wish to significantly change the initial design.
How Long Does It Take To Create A SiteWorks Express Website?
Typically a minimum of 2 weeks, but possibly longer if you need time to gather logos, images, photos, and content. A typical turn-around is 4 weeks, but this number is flexible. Writing or acquiring content is the most time consuming part of the process, and you are usually the one who is responsible for that activity.
Can You Add Custom Functionality To SiteWorks Express?
We can program custom functionality onto our powerful SiteWorks Express platform. Our professional development team can build nearly every website function you can imagine - we have also successfully integrated it with 3rd party applications and databases. Please
contact us for more information on any custom website functions you might need.
Where is SiteWorks Express Hosted?
We host SiteWorks Express in state of the art cloud based hosting environments that give us scalability, reliability and worldwide reach. Due to the complex back end systems used for the content management system we can not install SiteWorks on your servers or on a leased server - it is a "hosted" solution that we run on our servers. The advantage to you is that the low monthly hosting fee gives you all base SiteWorks Express upgrades free. Occasionally we offer optional enhancements that might incur additional cost, but basic functionality and upgrades are always free.
Do I Own My SiteWorks Express Website?
Yes and no. Upon payment in full for your website, you own all website images, photography, content, display code (HTML) and form databases. We own the SiteWorks Express code and license its use to you. If you choose to move your website to a different host, we will provide you with the website images, photography, content, display code (HTML) and form databases. Any professional web developer would be able to reassemble it - but it would NOT have the SiteWorks Content Management System. For more information, please check out our
terms of use.
What About Upgrades?
SiteWorks is a work in progress. We are always working on new features are options that we will announce from time to time. Many upgrades are free of charge, some upgrades are optional and have a reasonable cost. We will notify you of any upgrades or features.
With the proliferation of websites out there, your website must stand out from your competitor's. Your website is a direct reflection on the credibility of you and your organization. For this reason, we don't use design templates to build SiteWorks Express sites. Each website is created by professional designers with a unique design that is based on your input and on market and competitive research.
Because SiteWorks express uses a powerful database and software code as its foundation, creating new pages is as easy as clicking a few links and adding your content. No need for authoring HTML, using FTP, or buying confusing and complicated web authoring programs. With SiteWorks Express, pages are "logical" and not actual files on the server, so we don't care how many you create.
You can also mark pages as "hidden" so you can create pages and get them just right before making them live to the world.
WYSIWYG - What You See Is What You Get
A WYSIWYG editor allows you to format the web page content so that you can see the text and images laid out the way they'll appear on the website. CLICK HERE to see a screenshot of what our CMS looks like editing this page.
SiteWorks Express lets you upload images and files directly into your website library using only your web browser. You don't need to learn FTP, or use any special programs for managing your website files. The library allows you to store files into multiple levels of folders to keep your website files organized and neat. To add one of the library files to your website, just click a button in the tool bar to link images, PDF files, Word documents and more.
Word, Excel, PDF documents and files created by other programs often contain hidden characters that, when pasted into your website content editor, can produce strange characters and unpredictable results on your web page. SiteWorks Express has a cleaning tool that scrubs these hidden characters out of the content after you've pasted content from an external program. It reduces the time and aggravation of having to clean the junk out manually.
Navigation elements are often part of the website design. With SiteWorks Express we can create a design with multiple navigation "regions" that allow you to add, modify or delete navigation links without breaking the overall website design.
A site map is useful for content heavy websites since they allow the visitor to go straight to any page in the website with minimal clicking. But just as important, the site map is used by search engine crawlers to find all the pages in the website quickly and easily. SiteWorks Express has a site map that automatically updates when pages are added or deleted or are marked as "inactive". So you never have to worry about keeping your site map up to date when working on your website.
A website blueprint is a document that shows the relationship of the web pages to each other. It is important because it defines how the site will navigate and how the visitor will access the site content. A website blueprint is sometimes called a site map. Base SiteWorks Express pricing lets you define the site map. However, for clients who need professional direction on the site map, we offer a low cost option for one of our website experts to assist you in developing the site map.
Base SiteWorks Express pricing includes one website design with no revisions. Sometimes the designer nails the design the first time and you love it, but sometimes it needs a little more work to get it exactly the way you want. Rather than inflate our base pricing to include the time and effort needed for revisions, we only charge if revisions are needed. Our designers REALLY want to nail the design, so they will be working hard to get there the first time.
SiteWorks Express comes with a single design based on a detailed questionnaire and your input. Occasionally the decision is made to abandon the original design and start from scratch, or a subsequent design is desired to provide a different perspective. We can provide additional designs done by a new designer.
Flash is a multimedia technology that allows animation and screen effects not achievable with standard web technologies. We have developed a Flash rotator that allows the website administrator to add high quality images into a "slide" show that can enhance the presentation of almost any website. Each image in the slide show can be reordered and can link to a page in the SiteWorks Express website, or to any other website.
The ability to search a website by keyword is a critical feature of some content heavy websites. We have developed an affordable, powerful website search engine that indexes all the website content and makes it searchable.
Analyzing what words visitors are using to search for content on your website can provide powerful feedback to evaluate the usability of your site. This feedback can help you re-organize your content and make changes to the site to serve the content your visitors are looking for. Our keyword reporting system stores keyword searches and displays the results in tabular and graphical format. This option requires the Website Search Engine.
The SiteWorks Express system has a powerful content management system that allows you to add or modify your website content. However, content load can take time - time that you may not have. For those of you who prefer not to add your website content, our professional webmasters can quickly add your content.
The SiteWorks Express system has a powerful content management system that allows you to add or modify your website content. The content management system is fairly intuitive, but we can provide professional training for those of you who wish to get started faster and without the time needed to learn the system on your own.
Analyzing the activity on your website is critical. You need to see how much traffic you're getting, where it's coming from, and what visitors are doing on your website. SiteWorks Express base pricing includes Google Analytics for 24/7 access to website activity reports. With Google Analytics, you'll see how many visitors you had at your site, what pages they're accessing, where they're coming from and more.
Email borne threats have become a serious problem for all internet users. Fortunately, there are solutions to protect against email borne threats of spam, viruses, and inappropriate content. We offer very powerful email filtering services that protect you and your organization from the threats that email presents.
Friendly URLs (also known as landing pages) are web addresses that are easier to communicate and remember than traditional web addresses full of backslashes, question marks, ampersands and so on. With SiteWorks Express you can create a friendly URL for any page in your website such as www.yourcompany.com/promote The URL can be customized to make it relevant to a particular marketing campaign or promotion.
Analyzing the activity on your website is important to see how much traffic you're getting, where it's coming from, and what visitors are doing on your website. SiteWorks Express base pricing includes a monthly report of website activity. From this report, you'll see how many visitors you had on your site, what pages they're accessing, and more. We do offer Google Analytics as an option for enhanced website metrics.