WEBSITES

Why Epoch Online?

The difference between Epoch Online and other web companies is that we know that websites today must be thoroughly organized and well planned before any code is written or any graphics are designed. In order to maximize your investment, your website needs to incorporate marketing and advertising aspects as well as solid programming and attractive layout. Good web design demands a big picture approach, and our web designers do just that. Advertising companies take the time to brainstorm and pick the company apart in order to get every possible asset presented and every need considered. So does Epoch Online.

The Elements
Our aim is to create a full, valuable story of why a customer should use your business. To make sure that there are no holes in a website's content, we ask the following questions:

Who are the target users?
Whose needs must be considered?

• Customers
• Vendors/Suppliers
• Site Owner
• Investors/Bankers/Buyers

Why should the site be seen and read?
What are all the possible elements that could be presented?

From this list (which has been significantly shortened here for space-saving purposes), we extract all the elements that are potentially relevant to your business. These elements will be included in the text of the site either as paragraphs, images or links to more information, depending on relevancy and availability of details.

Organization
A solid organization of the above elements provides the foundation of a site's design. Depending on the nature of your business, decisions must be made about how best to communicate your products and services. Whether you decide that your business needs to be presented graphically or textually, organizing the content in an easily navigable manner is of primary importance.

Content
Naturally the text of a site should be informative and to the point. From the element list mentioned earlier, the content is either gathered from your sources or written by us. An important aspect of writing website text is that considerations must be made for something called Search Engine Optimization (SEO). Optimizing website text means that the words you want people to search for to find your site are well represented in your site's text. Search engines have "robots" that scan the entire Internet looking for the words that people need to find. So, when you go to google.com and search for "dogs," you find websites that have the word "dogs" all over them. There are other factors that determine search results, of course, but solid content is primary and that is one of the many things that sets Epoch Online apart from the flashy, fly-by-night web designers.

Graphics
A site needs to look good of course, but it also needs to load quickly. You can have a website that looks like the Mona Lisa, but you have to make sure that it's under 100k in size, loads quickly on a 56k modem, fits easily in an 800 x 600 monitor and displays properly in as many browsers and on as many platforms as possible. That's not always an easy task for most people to accomplish, but it's what Epoch Online does every day.

Programming
Your site has to be functional, error-free, and powerful. It should be flexible, manageable and easy to upgrade. Back-end solutions are Epoch Online's specialty. Database-driven websites can give your company real strength to compete. It can provide the interactivity with your customers that can make a world of difference. Whether you are a realtor who needs to upload vacancies in real time, a car dealer with a complete online inventory, a resort that wants to keep track of potential guests, or a retailer in need of an online shopping cart, Epoch Online can do it. In fact, we've already done it. We can even allow you to be your own webmaster with access to your site's information from anywhere at anytime.

Marketing
Your content-rich, attractive, powerful site is still meaningless if people don't know about it. Integration of your website into your advertising is essential, as is email data capture and other tools for Search Engine Optimization like Meta tags and search engine URL submissions.

Conclusion
These are just a few of things that Epoch Online does everyday that set us apart from the rest. We're not programmers that design or designers who program, we're anything and everything you need us to be for your web design solution. Striking a balance between design, programming, marketing and advertising is what we try to do for you, because information technology is about doing better business.