New website creation service makes sense for designers and their finances

The Smarter Web Company is offering a new service which gives designers the opportunity to fully brand a powerful online content management system (CMS) and use it as a quick and easy way to build professional quality sites at a fraction of the usual cost to their business. Designers can charge their clients any fee they want, including a monthly charge for on-going CMS access and website hosting, with the potential to create a regular income for their business.

Additionally, the hassle of actually building a site is removed, and designers are left with more time to do what they do best – the design itself.

Competition prize

To celebrate the launch of this service, My Smarter Website is giving away a free account worth £240 which enables you to build up to 10 websites in a month. For more details of the account’s benefits see below and also visit http://www.mysmartercms.co.uk

For your chance to win simply send an email to: competitions@mysmartercms.co.uk writing ‘CMS competition’ in the subject line.

Fixed price, increased profits

The branded service comes at a very low fixed price, which includes a free markup service (see below). So designers can charge the client whatever they like, and pocket the difference. This could mean vastly increased profits for a design business’ website creation services.

Free design markup service

Uniquely, a free service to take a design produced by an agency and code it into a website is included within the low monthly charge. This means a web designer doesn’t have to potentially pay thousands to a third party for doing the build element, and retains much greater control over delivery times.

Profit example

The sites are of a high quality and ordinarily a design agency could charge upwards of £3,000 to build something similar. If an agency signs up to an account with My Smarter CMS they get an agreed number of websites for a monthly charge (the packages start at 10 websites for £240 each month) and as we markup the sites for no additional charge the potential profit is huge.

Because the CMS is fully branded, and essentially ‘theirs’, the agency can quote normal fees as the involvement of My Smarter CMS is transparent to the client.

For example, an agency signs up to the bottom package which gives them 10 websites at £240 per month. They charge their clients £3,000 per website as a design and build fee and then £30 per month for hosting and the CMS access. The total year one figure would be £33,600 and after a cost of their time to design the websites, manage their clients and the charge of £2,880 by My Smarter CMS. The total profit (not accounting for the agencies time) would be £30,720!

Building up a regular monthly income

Once a client’s website has been built, that client then has the option of using the branded CMS tool to manage their site on a daily basis. Again, the designer can charge the client whatever they choose for this and because on-going access to the CMS is included in a low fixed fee package, it can help remove one of the biggest uncertainties involved in running a design business: not having a fixed, regular monthly income.

There are several packages on offer, tailored to suit the very smallest of design businesses, to large design agencies handling a high volume of business.

We think this is a great deal and makes a lot of business sense for individual designers and agencies alike. For more information take a look at http://www.mysmartercms.co.uk/ and call/mail us for more information and to discuss terms.

Good luck with the competition!

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Heart Internet recently got in touch with me to help get as many talented designers as possible to enter their brand new design competition. I fondly remember entering this competition last year and it was a lot of fun having the chance to create a concept advert for a big brand like Heart Internet. The eventual winner of the 2009 competition was David Baker who designed a superb advert mixing photography, imagery and Heart Internet’s brand colours.

Following on from the success of last year’s competition they are looking for another designer to create a brand new magazine advert for them and win £2,000 worth of prizes. As well as winning a 27” iMac, a 32GB iPod Touch, free Reseller hosting for a year and a free domain name the winning design will be also used in a national magazine.

The competition is open to any designer, Heart Internet customer or not, and closes 15th August.

For more information and to enter visit their website:  http://www.heartinternet.co.uk/designcompetition/

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Please note: Unfortunately this competition is only available to UK residents, please accept our apologies if you are outside of the UK.

I use Expression Web as my main editor on my PC for HTML and CSS coding. The interface is clean, intuitive, extremely quick to work with and supports multiple schemas.  The particular highlights of Expression Web for myself are the superb FTP manager which allows you to quickly connect to different sites to make edits (very handy for maintaining multiple client websites) and the “Super Preview” which lets you check your website in different web browsers (including multiple versions of Internet Explorer)

If you use a PC to write HTML and CSS code I strongly recommend you download a 60 day trial of Expression Web at http://www.microsoft.com/expression/ and try it out for yourself.

Competition

The competition is for one of two licences for the complete Expression Studio 3 suite including all 5 of these elements:

• Expression Web
• Expression Blend™
• SketchFlow
• Expression Design
• Expression Encoder 3

To be in with a chance of winning one of the answers simply leaving a comment below or e-mailing phil@thewebdesignblog.co.uk

The competition runs until the 30th May 2010

The two winners will be chosen at random by www.wearesocial.net who will send the product to the winner within a week of getting the winners contact details.

Unfortunately this competition is only available to UK residents.

Requirements: PC running on Windows XP & Service Pack 2, Windows Vista or Windows 7.

More Information about Expression Studio

• SketchFlow prototypes are fast, easy and inexpensive to build, making it possible to create, explore and compare multiple ideas before moving forward with a solution. Learn More
• Expression Web makes creating compliant standards-based Web sites faster and easier. With a state-of-the-art design surface that generates clean CSS, you can make design decisions on the fly, knowing that you’re seeing a faithful representation of the final browser-rendered page. Learn More
• Expression Blend™ is the tool for interaction design on the Silverlight and .NET platforms and enables user experience concepts to be delivered with full fidelity, from the initial prototype to the completed project. Learn More
• Expression Design is a professional design tool for creating graphics content that can be used within the authoring applications in Expression Studio: Expression Blend and Expression Web. Learn More
• Expression Encoder 3 provides the power of industry leading encoding, in a simple approachable interface to make it easy to prepare video for use in a variety of ways, including Silverlight on the Web. Learn More

You can download a 60 day trial at http://www.microsoft.com/expression/

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About Heart Internet Reseller Professional:

Heart Internet’s Reseller Professional account has been specially tailored for web designers, Internet integrators, web hosting resellers and developers.

The Reseller package includes unlimited web space, unlimited bandwidth and the ability to host unlimited domains at no extra charge plus many features that other hosting companies charge for, such as generic secure server access; free use of our generic name servers; and branding of your control panel with your own logo, company name and look and feel. You can add as many Linux or Windows hosting accounts as you like at no extra charge.

At just £29.99 per month the Heart Internet Reseller Professional is outstanding value for money and comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee, real-time account activation and the ability to cancel anytime.

Question:

How many domain names can you host with the Heart Internet Reseller Professional account?

A. 10
B. 100
C. Unlimited

WINNERS! Congratulations to Levi Ripley and Markus Holmroos who were chosen at random by Heart Internet to win the competition. Heart Internet will be in touch with you soon with more information.

My Review of Heart Internet

When Heart Internet approached me about running a competition on my website I was delighted because I’ve been a very satisfied reseller with them for nearly 3 years.

I first opened an account with Heart Internet in March 2007 mainly because my previous hosting company had made it very difficult to allow my web design clients to access their own FTP or e-mail accounts. This was fine in the early days but more and more of my clients wanted full control of their accounts so I knew I had to change.

I researched several reseller packages but decided on Heart Internet after reading several positive reviews and trying out their free hosting package to test the water. After a few days of testing their control panel and being very impressed with the technical support (support tickets have always been dealt with promptly) I decided to upgrade to the full reseller package.

I had quite a few websites to transfer over from my old host but it was more than worth doing. Now my clients all have their own control panel to setup e-mail addresses, install software (Heart Internet provide a wide selection of regularly updated software that can be installed with one click) and can manage their hosting account themselves if they want to. It is so much more flexible than what I was used to and a breath of fresh air.

At the end of 2007 Heart Internet introduced HostPay which is an automated shopping cart system to allow your customers to order domains, web hosting and administer all parts of their account (view invoices, change contact details etc…)

HostPay connects with several payment systems and you can choose to have everything automated or you can process orders manually if you prefer.

HostPay has been great and has allowed me to offer hosting to new clients rather than just my existing web design clients which is great for earning residual income alongside normal work. There are several templates included but it is quite straightforward to build your own design round the HostPay tags. In fact, pretty all parts of the reseller system are white label and give you complete control of branding!

If you ever need assistance you can contact Heart Internet via their very support ticket system which has proven to be very prompt and helpful. I’ve often got ticket responses within a few minutes (even in the middle of the night!) which is very reassuring that you are in safe hands.

Overall, I am delighted with the services Heart Internet have provided me over the last 3 years and I highly recommend them. If you are a web designer you’ll find their reseller package fantastic.

Good luck with the competition! If you want to try out Heart Internet please click here and click the free hosting option at the bottom of their home page.

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The Prizes

Single page PSD to XHTML conversion for two lucky winners worth $99 each!

10% off your first order for everyone who enters our competition!

Winners

The competition has now finished. We’ve picked two winners at random:

• Garry Aylott (@GarryAylott)
• Enrico Bonardi (@webbografico)

Congratulations Garry and Enrico!

CodeSublime will be in touch with you soon with more details…

How To Enter

There are two ways you can enter:

1. Click here to retweet this article on Twitter
2. Leave a comment below

Competition Rules

Two winners will be chosen at random on the 6th November 2009 and will each receive one free page of PSD to XHTML conversion.

10% discount rules: Everyone that enters the giveaway will receive 10% off their first order at CodeSublime. All you have to do is mention the name you’ve left your comment under or provide a link to your Twitter message and the code CodeSublimeWebDesignBlog10%. You don’t have to wait until the end of the giveaway to take advantage of this offer.

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