These are some hopefully helpful questions and answers that we hear a lot during free client consultations:

Q. How Long Have You Been in Business?
A. Standout Solutions, LLC has been doing business in Sarasota, Bradenton and Venice for over 5 years. All of our staff have at least 10 years of real world, commercial experience in website design and development.

Q. How Much Do You Charge?
A. We charge on a per project basis. The minimum cost for a custom website including all the standard content manager, website statistics and email marketing tools is $5000. Additional modules such as the Events module or E-Commerce module add extra cost as does additional custom development work such as custom forms and custom Multimedia or Flash work.

Q. Why Should I Choose Standout?
A. Standout Solutions targets itself primarily at small to medium sized businesses and startups. We offer the highest possible quality custom design and development work, tailor-made to fit your business, at the best possible value for money. Over many years we have built the highest quality, most non-technical, point and click, proprietary tools and modules to allow our clients to update their own websites when they want to, 24 hours a day. As their own business changes and adapts so can their website.

Q. Where Does Standout Solutions Advertise?
A. We do not advertise in any publications or media (apart from the Internet), our prefered method of promoting our business is word of mouth. High quality, timely, professional work that actually delivers on what it promises is the best form of advertising, we like to put our name on everything that we do. Word of mouth is the best way that we have found to do business in Florida and a positive referal from a trusted friend is also, we believe, how our clients prefer to do business too. Over a third of our work is either pro bono or heavily discounted so that we can invest in the community that supports us.

Q. What Development Tools Do You Use?
A. We use the latest Microsoft development tools such as Visual Studio 2005 including Active Server Pages.NET (2.0) for the delivery of custom website pages. We use Microsoft SQL Server 2000 and 2005 for the most scalable, reliable and efficient website performance. Our graphic designers use Photoshop CS and Macromedia Flash.

Q. How Do My Customers Find My Website?
A. There are many ways that a customer or potential customer can find your website and not all of them start with the Internet but the one that everyone always fixates on is of course Google®. We of course submit your website to Google as we do for many other popular search engines but everyone does that. Secondly, we make sure that you are registered properly as a business with Google services such as Google Maps. The most important dimension however is allowing your customers to find you by typing in relevant (to your business and to your geographic target area) keywords into Google web search. There is no simple Q and A answer for this so please read our more detailed explanation on Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Q. What E-Commerce Solutions Do You Offer?
A. We have several affordable, custom built e-commerce modules that are available to our customers. Our latest is a custom module based on the Google Checkout® service (free until Jan 08 and then low per transaction fees). We also offer custom, professional e-commerce solutions using PayPal® Pro (allowing customer the options to checkout with their PayPal ID).

Q. How Do I Update My Website?
A. Standout Solutions proprietary Website Content Manager comes standard with every website. In laymans terms this is a special tool that is an extension of your website that allows you to change or add content to any web page within your website at any time of day or night. The website content manager is used through your own web browser (like your website) and accessed with a login email and password. You can also add web pages to your website at any time allowing you to create completely new content for your customers and add these new pages to any (enabled) menu within the website too. Every page on this website is constructed and maintained by using the Standout Solutions Content Manager by the way.

Q. Can I Add Photos to My Website?
A. Yes. You can add photos to your web pages at any time using the Content Manager. Not only can you add any photos from your computer or network, the easy to use photo manager will resize them automatically for you when adding them to the photo catalog without you having to know how it does it. You can then insert the photo pretty much anywhere in the content of the web page, size it and even link it to another page or website. 

Q. What Else Can I Add to My Web Pages?
A. There are many things that are easy to add to your website page by selecting, point and clicking, such as color, formatting, special characters, tables, links, photos and even Adobe Acrobat documents (embedded or as links). For more advanced users, you can even edit the HTML for the page directly to give you unlimited possibilities.

Q. How Can I Communicate With My Customers?
A. Every custom website that Standout Solutions builds comes complete with an Email Marketing Manager (built into the Content Manager) that not only comes complete with an integrated Contact Manager but allows customers to subscribe to your email list through your website. The professional grade Email Marketing Manager then allows you to send rich HTML-based emails (one custom template included in cost) or plain text emails to your lists and groups of contacts, subscribers and customers. Other advanced email marketing features such as read tracking, click tracking and automatic unsubscription come built in. You can send them newsletters, coupons and so much more. This type of service is typically a $500 - 1000 cost when purchased separately but comes as standard with our Content Manager.

If you have any additional questions that aren‘t answered above please Contact Us anytime.