Mavista Blog

After you’ve decided on the basic goals you want to accomplish with your website, next, you need to make the all-important decision of whether or not you’re going to build or buy. While there are tools such as GoDaddy.com or Wordpress.com that have made it easier than ever to build a website, keep in mind that the process can still be time-consuming, and that you will probably need at least a passing knowledge of HTML code.

Mitchell York, president of E2E Coaching, a small business consulting firm, and founder of TechWeb, a technology news-related site, advises small businesses to go ahead and make the financial investment in hiring a designer, if they can afford it. “I think most people just find it very hard to do on their own,” York says. “If you had a store on Main Street and you had to decorate the window, you could just throw something up there, or hire someone who would do it so you would stop traffic. It’s the same thing.”

But a half decent web designer will likely cost you $US1,500 and up, depending on the added tools and number of pages involved in the creation of your site. And that’s just the design part, how about web site hosting, domain configuration and system maintenance?

Confusing ah?? Well, luckily, you now have a new choice, “RENT A WEBSITE“! Mavista.com offers clients with a quick and easy all-in-one web solution allow clients to choose and customize a web design quickly and with fully web-based management system to manage content (pictures and text) and all other dynamic content like News, Online Forms, Product Catalogs, etc.

The monthly cost for a website is HK$398 (US$51) per month all inclusive (system rental, web hosting and system maintenance) and there is NO setup or installation fee. More important, although this is a rental service, client will still have the total ownership of its content and database generated by the website.

Here is a sample of the most basic package with pre-design template (FREE):

Dopo (HK) [Interior Design Company]

Dopo - Interior Design Company in Hong Kong

Dopo used a pre-designed web template which are FREE for all Mavista’s Clients. This website includes a Featured Projects and a Before and After section which are fully manage and maintained by the client. You can see, even though a web template was used, much of the content in the website are dynamically generated, making the website highly attractive and fresh. More importantly they are important features for the purpose of  SEO.

Here is a sample of a website created with the basic customized web design package (HK$6,500 / US$830):

Causeway Corner [Serviced Apartment in Hong Kong]

Causeway Corner - Serviced Apartment in Hong Kong

Causeway Corner wanted a more customized design for their newly renovated serviced apartment in Hong Kong. So they used customized design services to create a dynamic “online brochure” of their serviced apartment.  This website includes a promotion section and an online enquiry form which again are fully manage and maintained by the client. Again, for the purpose of SEO, Causeway Corner had concern about how they can effectively tackle SEO for their website. But any concern they had was quickly removed when they saw the SEO Module at the backend of the web-based management system that all of the major tools needed for SEO like META tags, Browser Titles, ALT tags, XML sitemap, Google Analytics integration were already in place.

This is something many people neglect when they decided to build a website. If the basic SEO features cannot be managed by themselves, they will have to rely on a 3rd party to do it for them, and that will push up their running cost a lot in the long run.

Mavista give you the best of both worlds, it handles all the technical aspect for you (Web Design, Website Setup, Domain Configuration, Web Hosting) and give you the freedom to maintain and manage your website with Mavista’s comprehensive web-based backend management system (CMS, News Management, Form Management, Product Management, SEO Module, Contact Management, eMarketing Module and much much more.) You can find out more about the website solution here.

Creating a great website is key to running a successful business, but for those who lack the necessary technical know-how, it could turn into a complicated process. This guide will get you started.

Today, the website of a company has usurped the front office as the place where first impressions are gleaned. Where it used to take a meeting or a few product samples for a customer to form an opinion about your business, now it’s only a matter of a simple Google search – which means you need to make sure that query result is a memorable one.

“Small businesses should be looking to have a personal presence on the Web – something that would back up a sales call or brochure,” says Tim Zack, a marketing executive at Red Clay Interactive, an Atlanta-based Web development firm. “It definitely shouldn’t be an afterthought – this is a capital investment in the success of your company.”

Here are some of the basics on how to start your website, as well as provide tips on designing and marketing the site to help drive business.

How to Start a Website: What Do You Want to Accomplish?
The first thing you should assess before embarking on your online venture is what exactly you want to accomplish with your site. Do you want to sell products? Do you want to create a blog about your company or service? Depending on your industry and the nature of your business, your site may have a combination of different functions.

- Brochure / general information: This type of site basically serves as your online business card. It provides information about who you are, what your company does, product or service pricing, possibly previous and current clients, and how customers should contact you. Carinat and Fred Kan & Co. are both great examples of what a general site should accomplish.

- Retail / e-commerce: An e-commerce site allows your company to sell products directly to customers. Sites like Home Convenience Online Supermarket and Chromaz Online Printing Store are great examples of a success the e-commerce site. It usually employs the use of a shopping cart and payment processing utility, such as PayPal.

- Content-driven sites: These include sites like news aggregator IrishURLs or streaming video hub YouKu.com, which generate revenue by posting fresh content on a regular basis, and maintain a library of hundreds or thousands of pages.

- Blogs: The blog can also be considered a content-based site, but more specifically, it involves a person (or people) from the company or site who regularly posts information relevant to their product or industry. Many business owners use this format to help generate a loyal customer following and drive sales.

- Database sites: Examples of these would be the localized classified site Craigslist or travel search engine Kayak, where users can search for content or information that has been amassed from different resources or websites.

- Forum or community sites: These sites usually involve large groups of people who share ideas and comments with one another on various topics. These include Q&A sites, such as Bizmore.

THERE IS NO DOUBT THAT FLASH IS COOL! You see it and you want it. But, coolness has a price and if a web design company sells you on cool looking Flash site, you will be paying a lot MORE than the cost they have quoted you for.

Here are 4 reasons why:-

1) DEVELOPMENT COST – Flash development is lot more costly than standard website development. Roughly areound 100-150% more than HTML based website with Ajax / Javascripted effects. Moreover, everytime you want to update your content (even a single word), you will require a Flash developer to help you (they are usually quite well-paid and always busy!! )

2) ACCESSIBILITY – Although Flash is very common, there are still many web users (especially corportate users) who has no access to the Flash plugin. (Oh, you can say bye bye to all those iPad / iPhone users)

3) SPEED – Although most of us are now enjoying the great speed of broadband internet services, Flash sites are still relatively SLOW. You have to wait for the initials to load before you view and access the Flash site.

4) and….. SEARCH ENGINE OPTIMIZATION – Why build a beautiful website when nobody can find your website on search engines?? Although Google have said they can now crawl through Flash content, it is a fact that Flash-based sites perform extremely poor in general searches. Sites built in Flas prevent access to general web spiders, hence compromising their ability to be crawled and indexed.
This is why we don’t offer Flash-based website to our Mavista clients (there are exceptions of course, for example, online game websites). We understand the need to create cool and attractive websites, but we have created many eyes-catching but yet SEO friendly websites. Check them out: Our Project Portfolios