Website Planning Worksheet

This questionnaire is designed to enhance communications between Stormys'-) and our clients. Why don't you have it handy when you discuss your project on the phone with a Stormys'-) representative. After we've you've filled in the blanks as we talk on the phone, please make a photocopy for your records, and mail a signed copy to me. It provides a written memorandum of our mutually agreed plan.

Organization Name: _____________________________

1. Purpose

Give the most important purpose a "1", next most important a "2". Leave those blank which do not interest you at all.
__ To gain a favorable impression of the company or organization.
__ To develop a qualified list of prospects
__ To sell products directly taking credit card information over the Internet
__ To encourage potential customers to contact us by phone or mail to consummate a sale.
__ To make available product information and price lists to distributors.
__ To make available product information and price lists to customers.
__ To strengthen brand identification.
__ Other _______________________________________________________

2. Site Organization

Please label pages you desire and cross out the rest.

Typical Website

Total number of pages decided upon ________________

3. Site and Domain Names

Site Name on Masthead: _________________________________________________

Domain Name It must be registered through your web hosting service and approved by a domain registration service before you can use it. You may check the availability of your domain name at Network Solutions (http://www.networksolutions.com)

What is the Domain Name YOU currently Own?____________________________________

Do You want Stormys'-) to Search and Register the Domain Name for you for a small fee of $________. Domain Name Variations Acceptable:
__________________________________________________________________ __________________________________________________________________

4. Masthead Graphic

It is very helpful if you will include a copy of your company's letterhead, brochures, catalog, etc. so we can see how you present your company image.
__ Company Logo used as the masthead graphic? If so, please enclose a color copy.
__ Photo or drawing of product?
__ Typeface preference _______________________________________________

__ Preferred colors in palette. ___________________________________________________________________

__ Other ideas/suggestions/preferences ___________________________________________________________________

5. Color and Accents

For the most part, we recommend a white or light background for best readability and contrast, with a band of color or a pattern running down the left margin of the webpage; Although a black or very dark background with light text works well too. Your preference: ______________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________________________________________

We include a link at the bottom of the welcome page which reads "Website Designed by Stormys'-)"

6. Navigation System

The navigation system of all our Standard Website Packages includes:

Links from the front page and sectional pages to every page in the system to enable Web search engines to "spider" and index content on every page.
Colored bar "Image Map" with a brief word or two indicating each page -- or, in larger sites -- each section of the website. This appears at the bottom of every page. In some sites we put this both top and bottom. You are limited to a maximum of about eight (8) selections on this image map. We use server side image maps to make it easy to expand the site at a later time without having to change the coding on each page of the site. For this reason, and to keep costs down, we do not include separate "buttons" on our standard sites. Included in sites of 5 pages or more.
If you would Like 'custom graphic buttons', we can created them and incorporate them into your website at our hourly rate.
Left-Side Menus with text links are especially useful on larger sites. Included in sites of 5 pages or more. They can allow more detail than an 8-item bottom image map, and can enable visitors to see from any page how to get to any other. These may be white or light-colored over a dark left-side color or pattern, or black or dark over a light left-side color or pattern. They will be an accent to the theme of your website.

Optional Systems. Circle those you wish incorporated in your site.

Left-Side "Buttons" can be used, but they are more expensive and time consuming to maintain when a change or addition is made to the system. Also, it takes longer to load many buttons than an image map of the same area (Extra charge)
Frames System where, typically, a scrolling menu remains on the left side to provide navigation. We do not recommend frames in practically any situation, since they are a design disaster. They do not always print out, cannot be bookmarked easily, and often make the page design look "tacky" with their ugly gray scroll bars. We see them as the amateur's way to look cool. In a very few cases, they are useful: (1) to display large databases of information, (2) purposely hide URLs of content pages, (3) send visitors to other sites while making it easy for them to come back. (Extra charge)
Search Engine is useful on larger sites of 20+ pages to help visitors quickly find what they're looking for. (Extra charge)

7. Basic Page Elements

These are the important items which appear on nearly every webpage on your site.

Page titles which show at top of Web browser only
Top or Bottom-of-page graphic based on the design of the masthead graphic
Page Title in larger type. Heading Font Style: ________________ (recommend Arial Bold)
Text. Body Font Style: ___________________ (recommend Times New Roman)
Image Map by Image Map bar
Standard company ID near bottom of page
Contact Info Link goes to page containing physical address, mailing address, phone, fax, email, etc
E-mail response link to the following e-mail address: _________________________________________
Copyright and trademark information in small print at the bottom of every page. What registered trademarks, trademarks, and service marks does your company want to indicate here?

Do you have any trademarks or service marks? If so, please list them here and indicate which are registered trademarks.

8. Photos, Graphics, Animations, Sound, and Video

Our contract includes a statement that you own the copyright to, or have permission from the copyright owner to use any photos or graphics you send us.

Clipart too much clipart tends to look a bit tacky on websites. but 'just enough' of the right theme clipart can give a website color and make it come to life. We have a Large stock of clipart.
Photos you supply either by sending the photos themselves for us to scan and return, or by sending the digitized images on a diskette. (there is a small addition fee for scanning)
Stock photos obtained from the internet (You write down the website name and photo number and inform us of your choices, and which page each photo goes on. We will bill you for the Stock Photo Sites charges. We can help you select the photos, but we would need to bill you for our time at our hourly rate.)

For an extra charge, we can equip your webpages with:

Sound, either MIDI musical background or streaming Real Audio for music or voice.
Animated GIF images. High quality photo images are available from from many sources on the internet. We also have a large Stock of Animated Gifs.
We can also make animations for an extra charge.
Page Transitions, Page Transitions are the way some webpages dissolve in or checkerboard out, etc. They can be a unique asset to make a website more Individual.

9. Response Forms

What is the purpose of your response form?

__ Guestbook for visitors to record comments
__ Request for information
__ Survey of customer preferences

We can set up any of the above response forms for you for an additional fee.
With maybe the exception of the 'Request info' form, I Personally do not care for response forms. They have generated too much abuse and mis-use for some client Web Sites I have created in the past. So I usually recommend the omission of response forms from websites, rather making several 'contact' options available such as email, phone, fax, etc.
Note: We do not set up sites that use the response form as an order form, since these require secure servers, and secure order pick-up. For one or two products we recommend using "PayPal" with a secure server. They also have a 'business' option with a "Shopping Cart" available for a small commission of each sale.
We charge extra to set up the ordering system or the shopping cart.

10. Web Hosting Service

We are not in the web hosting business. We recommend to our clients web hosting services tailored to their specific needs. We've worked with dozens of hosting services -- the good, the bad, and the ugly. We usually do not recommend hosting on your local dial-up ISP, since they too often are not well-prepared to meet specialized business site hosting needs. Their main business is usually dial-up access, and hosting is only a sideline for them. Please let us recommend a Web host service for you. We require cgi-bin access and FTP and Front Page access, and strongly recommend telnet access. Our no-extra-cost response form also requires a Unix system with Perl language available.

Web Hosting Service ___________________________________________________________
Phone: _____________________________ E-mail for support or help ______________________________

Since Stormys'-) creates a large number of full domain websites, we have a web hosting server that leases spaces to us at a lower price than the individual can usually find on their own. So If you Prefer, Stormys'-) CAN secure a Web Hosting Server for you under our name, and you would simply pay us the server costs. A simple contract would be made up for this option. We can also register your domain name if you don't already have one.

OR if you are not planning on the extra expense of a full domain name website at this time, Stormys'-) can provide a 'sub folder' type website which can be hosted on one of our many websites. This option can save small business, drivers and others money as they enter into the World of the Web.

11. Registering and Advertising Your Website

Advertising your Website to Web search engines that index the Web
Giving customers a good reason to come by offering them something
Finding industry-wide linking pages and negotiating reciprocal links to and from their webpages.
Purchasing Web advertising
Becoming active in several of the thousands of Internet news groups and mailing lists
Developing a "signature" mini-ad attached to all your e-mail messages
Making your website part of one or more of the many "malls."
Including your e-mail and Web addresses on all your company's print literature, stationery, and display advertising
E-mail newsletters

Information about number of visitors to your website can usually be obtained from your Internet Service Provider, from statistics generated daily by such programs as WWWSTAT, GETSTATS, or Analog on the host computer. We do not include page counters on our Standard Website Packages.
But if you have Stormys'-) secure your Hosting server, we can provide you with a copy of the website stats each month.

We submit your information to Web search engines to "register" your website after final payment is received. Before doing this we work with you to get 50 to 100 keywords and a carefully constructed 25-word sentence contain the most important keywords.

12. Maintenance

Target Date____________________

Package prices include changes and minor updating over the first 30 days of the contract. This covers minor price changes, product changes, etc. It does not include major changes, such as changing newsletter content (which essentially involves constructing a new webpage), which is billed at our hourly rate.

Target Date for final payment to be made and your Web Site to be advertised: ______________________________

If you require Regular weekly or monthly maintenance for your website, be sure and speak with us, we can provide this service for a monthly maintenance fee.

On behalf of my organization I approve the above plan which I have developed with Stormys'-) to construct a website, and I authorize Stormys'-) to use this Website Planning Worksheet as the basis of the project.

Signature ________________________________________________________ Date ________________________

These are the items that will make up the package you'll be sending to us:

Website Planning Worksheet
Website Design Contract
Website Content Worksheet which will define for us the:

Written content for your webpages (preferably on a diskette formatted for Word for Windows [2.0, 6.0, 7.0, 8.0, or 2000], Word Perfect [5.1, 6.0+], or other word processor. We can translate from most word processor formats with ease.)
Photos or graphics to be included. You may send graphics and photos which we can scan into electronic form. Even better, send us a diskette, CD or ZIP disk with your graphics in any popular PC format, such as GIF, JPEG, BMP, TIFF, etc.). If these are in Mac format, make sure each picture has a 3-digit extension, such as .jpg to indicate the format in which it is given.
Your company logo (if any), and tell us the theme color.

Samples of your printed materials -- brochures, letterheads, cards, booklets, etc. -- so we can see how you present your company image.
Check for at least 50% of the total.

You may send your package to Elaine 'Stormy' Lawson, Stormys'-), by US mail to our post office box:

P.O. Box 313
Gladeville, TN 37090, USA

or by UPS, FedEx, etc. to our physical address:

3575 Vesta Road
Gladeville, TN 37090, USA

We are looking forward to receiving your materials and constructing your website!

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