What if I'm interested in an eCommerce site? We've had experience with a number of shopping carts and payment methods (gateways, merchant accounts, PayPal, etc.) and would be happy to discuss your enterprise. If you take a look through our clients' sites (click Clients above) you'll find several shopping cart sites.

The biggest responsibility will fall on you to let us know how you want your products to look, to keeping your site up to date and fresh, to promoting your site so people can find it. We'll give you lots of advice but you need to be committed to spending some time with us and always with the site after it's running.

What costs are associated with an eCommerce site? Shopping cart software, with highly developed functionality, can be free (Open Source) or $5,000 per license, and everything in between. It's really up to you. The most common software we use ranges between $0 and $200 per license. You need one license per domain name.

However, you will want the software customized to reflect your business and your products. Customization can be fairly simple or fairly extensive. You can probably count on a minimum of 4 days of our time (about 30 hours) to install the software and make all the changes necessary to get you up and selling. Depending on the functionality required it could take a good deal longer.

If you intend to take online payments or transmit confidential data you will need an SSL Certificate. This is a piece of software that allows secure, encrypted transmission of private data between your web site and the customer's browser. SSL stands for Secure Socket Layer. SSL Certificates, like other products, come in a wide range of prices. We have a supplier that can give you a certificate for under $60.00 per year. Certificates are renewable annually. The more years you buy initially, the lower the cost. For instance, a certificate purchased for 3 years may be only a few dollars over $120.00, instead of $60 x 3 years.

If you intend to take online payments via Credit Card or eCheck, for instance, you will need a Merchant Account. If you don't already accept credit cards, a merchant account is an account that a merchant, like yourself, has with a bank in order to accept credit card orders from customers. The "bank" will charge a fee for each transaction and most probably there will be a monthly service fee involved. There is usually a "middle man" involved called a Gateway. The gateway provider acts as the "mail man" between your web site and the bank. The gateway provider will also have fees involved with their service.

The monthly fee for the server to host your eCommerce site will probably be $55.

 I think those menus that rollout more choices are great! How do I get one? Those are called DHTML menus (Dynamic HyperText Markup Language menus). Okay, that's already more than you wanted to know. We have worked with the dropdown, rollout, slide over, etc. etc. menus for years and finally came across one that we really like. It's small (read: fast), easy to configure, well written and very well supported. It's also pretty flexible so maybe we can create what you had envisioned. DHTML menus take longer to install than conventional menus. Of course.