Yes!

In 2023, there is no reason – no good excuse – not to upgrade any site to HTTPS by acquiring an SSL certificate. The the most popular web browser on the planet, Google Chrome, will give a big red warning to your visitors if your site is not fully secure. Firefox is already doing this, and Microsoft’s Edge as well as Apple’s Safari. So make sure you get an SSL certificate and keep it up to date. This will protect your content from being covertly altered and prevent your customers’ information from being monitored or stolen.

Depending on the size, complexity and, most critically, the client’s active involvement in the process, a website takes anywhere between one and 24 weeks to build and launch. Some incredibly large projects have broken the year mark.

We have the team of developers and web designers, as well as the project management processes, in place to build and deliver the most friendly, accessible, and speed-optimized websites available.

The process is highly collaborative, so build times can vary based on how quickly clients are able to respond to questions or approve portions of the site that inform other parts. Since we adjust and readjust to achieve the best UX and the best representation of our clients’ vision, delays are natural as we process feedback and get sites just right.

We want your site to succeed, and we are experts at doing that. Clients know their business and their customers, and we know marketing and design – when everybody sticks to their strengths and works together, we all win.

We’re always here to help! We can cover emergencies and non-emergencies alike. Just be sure to give us as many details as possible about the problem: the browser you were using when you noticed the problem, your computer’s operating system, time of day, what actions you were performing, what device you were using when you saw the problem, etc.

Additionally, we can provide a maintenance agreement to help prevent many common site crashes from ever happening in the first place. That way, problems are minimized, and you can have peace of mind knowing that when problems do occur, you’re covered!

So many acronyms. You practically have to be an expert in website development just to talk about web development. Let’s break down a few of the common terms:

CMS: Short for “Content Management System,” this is the platform you use to administrate and edit the content on your website. There are many different software solutions that bear this name. Though we prefer WordPress and are wizards on this platform, we also work with many other platforms.

Hosting: All websites live on computers somewhere. A hosting service is a company that has computers built especially for storing and accessing websites. These types of computers are often referred to as “web servers.”

FTP and SFTP: FTP (short for “file transfer protocol”) is a technology that allows us to communicate with the server (or big fancy computer) on which your website is stored (or “hosted”). Since we need a way to transfer and manage the files on that computer, FTP handles that.

SFTP is basically the same thing, but it uses certain technologies to secure the file transfers. FTP is to SFTP as HTTP is to HTTPS. If we ask for FTP or SFTP credentials, usually we’re asking for 1) a hostname, 2) a username and (3) a password.

DNS: Now we’re really in the weeds. Remember how all websites live on computers somewhere? Each of those computers has a numerical address assigned called an “IP” – even the smartphone or computer you’re using to read this has an IP address. You can visit many websites by typing this number into the browser, but numerical addresses are really hard to remember. Do you really want to type 172.217.6.14 every time you visit Google? Without DNS, you’d have to!

DNS (short for “Domain Name System”) translates domain names (like www.google.com) into those numbers so your website has an easy-to-remember name that humans can use. Because oftentimes, during a redesign, we move the website to a new web host (or server), we might ask the client for access to their DNS so we can direct the domain name to a different address. Visitors may never know that anything changed except that they’re now looking at a beautiful new website. That’s because DNS handled the change of address. Neat, huh?

Registrar: The registrar is where you bought your domain name. Because many companies provide both DNS and domain registration, the difference between them can start to get confusing, but essentially, a registrar is just a company that has a certain amount of control over something called a “top level domain” (TLD) like .com, .net, .org, .coop, and so on, and resells names with this TLD.

In cases where an overhaul of your current website is done, we might ask for access to your registrar if the DNS is impossible to access and we need to transfer your site hosting. We’ll use the registrar to point your domain to a different DNS, where we can make sure the domain name points to your new website host.

CDN: Short for “content delivery network,” a CDN is a collection of computers living in different places around the world that will take the static files on your website (like pictures, video, or other media and downloads) and store them on their network of servers around the world. When someone visits your website, instead of downloading a file directly from your web host, they’ll download images or files from the geographically closest computer in the CDN. This has the effect of not only speeding up your website load time but preventing a large amount of traffic from taking your website down.

Yes! In fact, if we built your website, we’d really love to handle maintenance. We’re going to be the party most intimately familiar with how your website works, and are going to be on top of upgrades and patches to keep the site in top shape.

A maintenance plan can include CMS upgrades, hosting management, content updates, security monitoring and many other technical and editorial services.

Reach out to us to learn more about Web Development for your brand

For web development services backed by experience and built to your brand’s specifications and ROI goals, consider working with Exclusive Sites. Explore our website development services to learn how we can help with your development needs, or contact us today!