If this were your estate agency site, you would include in here such details
as:
In fact anything which you might feel that the public might desire to know
about your agency. This page can be liberally sprinkled with illustrations,
such as a map of how to get to your office, photos of the staff to give a friendly
impresssion etc.
Back to the Front Page
Costs
Meanwhile you might want to know what it might cost to have your own Web Site?
The answer is that it is probably the least expensive form of full-colour fully-detailed
advertising that you have ever encountered; and what's more the viewers of your Internet
advertising pages are highly motivated towards purchasing a property and are mostly
self-selected from those with extra disposable income.
All prices indicated below, exclude VAT
Cost of Web Space
Though
your adverts will be available 24-hours per day, 365 days of the year, you don't
need a computer permanently connected to the Internet, instead you rent space on
a dedicated web server computer. The providers of the Web Server will handle all the
problems associated with telecommunications and optionally provide a backing up and reload
service, so that in the unlikely event of computer failure your pages will be restored
and functional again as rapidly as possible without further action on your part.
Subject to contract, this web space will cost you only £150 per
annum [Probably less than a 1/6 page advert in a single copy of a local newspaper] for a
whole 50 megabytes of space. Fifty megabytes is enough space to hold 10 copies of the text of the
Bible, or about 15 copies of Tolstoy's War and Peace, or around 1500 photographs of
properties each with a full textual description.
This cost can also be offset against the fact that you will not need to mail
detail sheets to customers using the Internet as they will see the whole of the
information anyway and you could sell small advert space on the bottom of each sheet
to local traders. So it could well be that your web space will cost nothing or even
bring in a profit!
Cost of your own access to the Internet
If
you want to be able to view the pages from your own office, or if you want
to perform your own updating of property information, then you will need
access to the Internet. It is unlikely that you will need
a permanent connection and so dial-up access
will be more than adequate for your normal requirements.
For
such an account pay-as-you-go services are available from a various suppliers (such as Tiscali) where the cost is embodied in
the cost of your phone calls. If your usage exceeds an average of 20 mins
per day it will usually be less expensive to buy a flat-rate account which costs around
£14.99 per month, but the phone calls are free.
In many areas you can also obtain a highspeed ADSL
or Cable-Modem connection for around £25
per month. The sheer convenience of an
always-on broadband ADSL or Cable connection makes such a connection highly desirable.
Prestige Extras
Ordinary web sites at the price shown above will have an address like:
http://www.datahighways.net/theunrealtors/Should you want your site to have a site name which hides the hosting portion, i.e:
http://www.theunrealtors.co.uk/thus making it
appear that you run your own internet server, and providing for the capability of
moving the real location of your site at a future date, then this facility costs
extra. It is known as Domain Name Registration with Virtual Server and costs around
£40 setup fee and £75 per annum.
Initial set-up of the pages
The licence fee to use this design is £500 once-only payment. Provided that you wish to
use this design, then customising it to suit your agency, (which includes creating a
digital version of your logo and revising the layout and colour scheme and
incorporating your version of this company information page) is a mere £220,
which is a once-off payment. Extensions beyond this design are charged according
to the work involved at £40 per hour.
Save £360 ! Introductory offer to the first 10 customers.
For my first 10 customers, I will charge only £250 for the licence fee and £110 for
the customisation. So you can save 360 by being one of the first to use my design.
Tuition
Your agency can do its own
maintenance of the property information on your
site, enabling you to make new properties available immediately. This maintenance
involves scanning photographs and preparing them for web page usage, typing
in the
property details into MS Word or WordPad and then pasting the revised pages
to a form on your webpages. Details of prices and properties can
be changed securely at any time by yourselves. Also it involves the deletion of the old pages
of the properties which you have sold.
Tuition so that your staff can perform these actions is available at £40 per hour,
(covers 1 through 10 members of staff). Depending on the existing knowledge of staff in respect
of word processing and use of modems, this tuition will typically take 8 hours,
in two sessions.
Installation of software and optimum setup of your computer to use the Internet
would normally be done just prior to tuition and is charged at £40/hour.
Regular Updating Service
Data Highways Ltd will provide an updating service for those agencies who do not wish
to do their own maintenance. The price is not yet fixed but will be set
on a per property basis depending on the average time taken to prepare the page for
each of your properties. You will send us a detail sheet with photograph(s) exactly
as you would normally send to a potential purchaser and we will do the rest.
Equipment Requirements
To view your web pages you will need the use a modern office computer equipped
with a fast modem, you probably already own a suitable machine.
The computer should be
an Intel Pentium or equivalent or an Apple Macintosh. If you don't have a broadband connection
such as ADSL or Cable-Modem then your dial-up modem should be 56K bps type,
for this kind of usage you do not need a separate phone line, the modem can
share the phone line used by your fax machine.
To maintain your
own information you will also need a photo scanner or digital camera.
Data Highways Ltd can supply or recommend any necessary
equipment.
Interested?
Please call me:
Tel: 020-8444-6706
Fax: 020-8444-7968
