web site

I want to start a web page do anyone know someone in the new york area Dave

i'd recommend Don , no matter where you live, he did mine i'm in ohio he's in texas

Do it yourself. I did mine @ Register.com. You can get a domain name, hosting and everything on one site for under $200.00) Plus the flexibility to work on it whenever you want. Great project for those bad weather days .You're not waiting on someone else to make changes to your site. All you need is a digital camera( at least 3megapixels) and some kind of printshop/printmaster/photo software ($9.99 @ WalMart). You'll get your money back in the first couple jobs...easy.

If you want to do it yourself, call Don, not Register.com. Way cheaper than what Register.com charges. (at least the last time I checked)

Sorry for a little advertising here but Robert is right. To the tune of about $95 cheaper if you want to do it yourself. However I'll also mention that we can build it for you, do all the photo work & make changes for you whenever you want for about the same as what they charge for a "do it yourself" (depending on what all you want & need). Plus for the "do it yourself" types there is always those little questions like: Do you know how to set up your own e-mails? Do you get 4 "live" stats programs monitoring your site 24/7 included? Is web mail (access your e-mail from any computer anywhere, anytime) included? Do you know how to do meta tags and keywords to optimize your site for the search engines, prevent AOL caching, etc. ? All things that are included with our services. (and our photo program cost us a little more than $9.95 ) Either way, we are very highly competitive in the hosting market whether you want to do it yourself or have us do it all for you. And as was said, I may be in Texas but we only have one of our customers besides this site who's also in Texas...and they are 300 miles away (Robert is only about 200)...the Internet doesn't care where you are. End of advertising... BTW: 3 mega pixels is way overkill for the Internet. The highest resolution noticeable on the Internet is 96 DPI, way less than 3,000 DPI so any digital camera will work just fine.

Hire DON. He just did our site the last few weeks and we're real happy. I think the whole bill came to about $300. check it out...... www.precisionstripingandsealcoating.com

Don, I wasn't knocking your service by any means. I had to bail out midway through my post (kids needed a bath). I probably could have had mine done for free by a relative . I'm just a hands on guy with an artistic side, so I enjoy that kind of stuff. Being I'm not really "computer savvy", I was amazed how easy it was (HTML optional). Honestly, I've kinda looked at it as a learning experience . I'm still not finished with my site, but it's served me well. I've had nothing but positive comments on the presentation( the women who call just love the pictures of the kids). Even a personal message from another forum member asking for advice. Most importantly, it's steadily bringing in work! As far as my advice on cameras...I use mine, for prints and internet work. Basically (from what I've been told) with 3 mp, you can go up to an 8 x 10 print without resolution loss (works for me). I'm actually contemplating an upgrade, to an 8 megapixel SLR type which takes multiple lenses ($1000.00+) My kids run around alot!....I'd equate your camera advice to telling someone they can stripe a lot with a roller. Sure it's cheap and it works. But, PLEASE? I'd have to say the $600 dollars I spent on my camera five years ago was worth it, ten times over. No question!! Sorry, if I offended the "loyal legions of Don". I'm just the kind of guy that refuses to pay someone to do something that I can do myself.... Shucks , I feel like I just drove a Chevy through the Ford dealership.

You missed what Robert was saying. We have a "do it yourself" WYSIWYG-type site builder (no software needed on your computer, no HTML needed) , so if you take all our "regular" prices, buy a name, pay our regular prices by the month for hosting, etc. add it up for 12 months...and it would be almost half what you paid and you can still do everything yourself the same way you did. Register.com is just a rip-off on their prices. As far as the camera take a look at your site on a computer with dial up, it will take forever to load pages. It's takes a while even on my DSL... that's because you didn't take down the resolution on those pictures. Just resample them down to 72 or 96 DPI, you will never see the difference on the web and the pages with photos will load much faster. I will point out though that what you said is true, you have the time, the interest, and the "artistic interest" to mess with it. We have had several customers who started doing it themselves & then just had us do one. They decided they didn't have the time or mainly the interest in working on a computer long enough. Actual web design work at our normal prices is usually a lot less than what they make per hour working & they decide they make more money paying us to do what we do so they have the time to do what they do. However we offer the site builder, templates, all that stuff because we have several customers who like using it and the idea of doing it themselves like you do...we just charge a lot less than them (we are more in-line with the industry "average" that company is just known to be way high for no good reason. I also warn people about them because if you decide to leave them they often give you a hassle over moving your domain name.)

Dan, the site looks great. Very professional, with lots of info. I have suggested before to go to "otto's parking marking" if you want to see an unbelievable web site with the best graphics I have ever seen. Sometimes I have trouble with the right name, but if you persist, you can get to it. The best you'll ever see! The company name is Otto's Parking Marking and I have zero affiliation. Just an admirer. It will give you some real neat ideas.

yellow, thank you. My son is the one who worked with Don on the site. They both did a great job. I can't seem to get to Otto's, but if you find the address let me know.

Otto's is one of my favorites...that is as a site that really impresses stripers but does relatively little for the potential customer (unless they have made some major changes lately). I give their graphics guy credit for the opening "Flash", I'm sure he wasn't cheap, but the rest of the site is lacking if you put yourself in a customer's shoes. If anybody wants my 2 cents worth they can PM me but I always get a kick out of how highly impressed other stripers are with the site. PS: To give you an idea, I'm VERY good with search engines and it took me over 40 pages of results to find it but it's http://www.ottospm.com/ One of the downsides is it's entirely in Flash (so no Flash plug in-no see web site) and while all the movement & rollover effects are cool (like all Flash sites) think of yourself as a customer, how easy is it to find out why you should choose them, how easy is it to find details of how they do the work & why they are better than their competitors, how easy to find pictures of their work, and no way to contact them except by e-mail... Also Flash has to pre-load so if you are on dial-up you will be waiting a while. Remember web "surfers" are lazy if they are looking for information (they will go through heck & high water if they are gamers or "downloaders" or such to get what they want) and the main principle is to make them work as little as possible (read that "click") to get the info they want. As an example this site is "fun" and informative but how often would you visit these forums if you had to wait for them to load and then click through 4 or 5 pages to get to them just to see if there were any new posts?

As a PS I wanted to clarify that if they like their site and it works for them that's great by me. I'm not being critical of the company or their choice in site technology. It's just not our market. They are a very large company with many crews and a budget to match. We specialize in "cost-effective" and IMHO Flash isn't cost-effective for pavement-related contractors in general. If someone wanted that type site I'd be glad to host it but would refer you to a specialized Flash site designer for that type work. I could do it, but it would take me far too long compared to a designer who specializes in Flash. As far as hosting there is no difference, it would be just as reasonable to host. I do incorporate some Flash elements into some sites at the customer's request but don't do entire sites in Flash like that one. Just wanted to be clear there were no "sour grapes" just different strokes for different folks.

Man that Otto site is fancy! But where is the music? You've gotta have a soundtrack for something like that.

wow! I wish I could layout and paint a lot as fast as Otto does. What's that, maybe 5 seconds? Looks very cool with my hi speed connection. Interesting that he doesn't have access aisles for all his handicap spaces, per ADA rules. Oh, well....

Well they do have 8 crews or more, even though they use all air-spray machines...& push rather than ride, but Flash is "cool", however most people looking for a contractor aren't as interested in a "cool" web site as a quality contractor who can do what they want, when they want. I'll also note that since dbarnettt posted about "do it yourself" programs and enjoying being able to do things himself that is impossible in Flash. Also unless a Flash programmer does some very elaborate programming to create editable "regions" within the Flash, Flash sites are a "one piece" creation. Unlike conventional web pages where say one of those employees changes or you want to change some other phone number, photo, or line of text, and it's no problem to do a quick edit, Flash normally requires the designer to "recreate" the entire site. Flash isn't understood by web browsers so it's similar to a video clip. It has to have an HTML page the browser understands to "trigger" the Flash player and start the movie (which is basically what a Flash is, even if it's an entire site, each action like clicking another page starts another "movie within the movie" in layman's terms). So the designer has to recreate the Flash with the needed changes in the right places & then resave it as a file the web understands & re-upload it (unless they have gone to that large initial expense of creating small editable HTML areas inside the Flash) Bottom line is a Flash designer would be at the very least 2-3 times as expensive per hour as what we do, and something like changing a photo, adding a phone number and perhaps changing a few lines of text that would take us maybe 15 minutes (less than $9.00) or if you are a "do it yourself" person & not very fast maybe 1/2 hour...would take them much longer, and those guys always have at least a one hour minimum. That's probably why when I found his site I noticed it was exactly the same as it was 2 years ago or so when I first saw it.

Just a note for those wanting to do it yourself ... Just last week our web site builder software got a HUGE (IMHO) update. The text editor is now far more advanced, more like a word processor... just little buttons for stuff like making bullet lists, links, changing fonts & colors & such. It's really cool and much easier than anything we (or anybody else I know of) had before as far as completing your pages & making them look like you want easily. We do not have a video of the new features in all our demo & training videos because it's so new & has so many more powerful-but easier features, the people that make the videos won't have an updated one for a month or two. It's very easy to figure out though, just like our current video only with more stuff & lots easier to use ...and WAY less than $200 a year

I'm thinking of dropping my flash intro to get ranked higher, I have way better luck with my old site with out the flash moving up toward to top searches. My old site comes up way before my new site that has been up for around 3 years and I submit them the same way. I am thinking the flash intro is hurting my new site. I had a county call me last week and say they couldn't view my site because of this, luckily they called and I can send them a demo video. Fancy is not worth losing potential customers in my book. I may drop it for a while to see if it starts to rank higher. darnett is a nice site but does load slow , but I have dial up. If I am searching for something and it loads slow I just back out and click a different site. How much do you pay per month for a local host? I find all the hosting companies around here to be higher priced than Don.

That's his total price for the do it yourself site builder, domain name & hosting. At my regular rates we would be about $85-90 less for the same things for our company that is regular "general" hosting (not PavementWeb) http://www.NewIdeaHost.com For what we offer we are very competitive with all the legitimate (not "too good to be true" companies out there). Just like there are the "cheap" stripers that water down their paint or whatever there are hosts that offer ridiculously low prices but they do not offer the same dependability, service & features we do. As I explained to someone who called the other day I could send you links to companies that rent basic Celeron servers with 256MB of RAM for $69 a month in low-end data centers and there are lots of "hosts" that will rent those and cram 300-400 $3-$4 accounts on them, which means they have a lot of dissatisfied customers who were looking for nothing but the "low bid". Of course those companies usually only offer billing by the year so if you get fed up and leave they have your $24 and as the saying goes "there's another sucker born every minute". I prefer to do web business like my philosophy on pavement work, better than it has to be. The administrators at the datacenter (Equinix in Chicago, same center as PayPal & much of eBay as well as one server bank for Google, who has banks at like 10-15 different data centers) often kid me about how my server are always just "loafing"... but we do nightly, weekly, and monthly backups of all accounts and (knock on wood) are at 100% uptime for 2006 (and we were at 99.9%+ for 2005 with the majority of that being from a fire in Chicago that knocked out all four of the big Tier 1 fiber optics to the entire datacenter for almost 4 hours). An acceptable normal server "load" is 5 with peaks to 6-8 for most hosts (those guys with the Celerons run 8-10+), while we average between .05 and .40 and only hit 1-1.5 when major things like some automatic server software update or patch happens to hit at the same time as our backup jobs are running (and that's always between 2-4 am CST when our customers have the least visitors, nobody would ever notice any difference on either server even at that.) At the time of this edit we have had 52,545 accesses to this server today and are running at .02 PS: I sent you an e-mail about your search rankings and what we can do there.

My uptime while hosting with Don has been five nines (99.999%) Before is was more like nine fives.

Don, I couldn't remember what I had payed for the site with Register.com, so I went back and looked. I payed $50.00 ($16.66/year) to hold the domain name for three years, $99.00/year for up to a 20 page site with web-hosting/builder etc., and $9.99/year for an email account. So my total out of pocket was like $158.99. If you average the domain name out over three years, I guess that would put me at about $125.00 a year. I'll let you do the comparisons. Usually, I try to look for the best deal when making a purchase. In this case, I kinda gotta a wild hair and said "what the heck, I'm gonna build me one of them websites!" Anyway, I'm payed up through August. Let me know between now and then, if/how you can help me out. I hadn't even looked at the Register.com site in months. I think they've made some changes/upgrades with their services. Like I said before, what I have right now seems to be working out fine. Thanks again, Dwayne