We've been designing northern VA web sites since 2007, but our roots go back to the early 1990s in Connecticut. Founder Walt Thiessen was among the first to experiment with the Internet and with putting up web sites. He started with an AOL account in 1988, but after just a few years he outgrew it and began work on very simple web pages. By 1997, he had designed and created his first full-fledged web site under its own domain name, and by September of that year he created his first site for a client, the Fairfield County Real Estate company in Southern Connecticut, a site Virginia Host still hosts today.

For most of the next 11 years, he worked with customers he found on the Internet itself as well as designing web sites for his own use. In 2007 he created the Nolan Chart web site, which today gets tens of thousands of visitors to it every month. The site is provided for writers from all political camps who want to write about political issues of the day. Within two months of launching it in August 2007, the site was picked up by Google News and has been very popular ever since.

When the financial crisis hit in 2008, a lot of the available work on the Internet itself dried up. He formed Virginia Host in 2007, and now he decided to change his emphasis to local businesses in Northern VA. In November 2009 he hired Mike Keeney to do telemarketing for him, and from that point on he began working locally in earnest, starting first with businesses in the Fredericksburg area and then later moving his focus toward Northern VA.

The focus of Virginia Host today is on working as a northern VA web site designer, but we have also expanded our focus since then. More and more customers today need help with getting their sites listed and highly ranked in the search engines. With more and more consumers using the web as their primary source of information when buying goods and services, businesses today recognize the importance of having an effective web presence.

Almost immediately, we realized that local businesses are being targeted by lots of web-based professionals, many of whom are closer to snake oil salesmen than actual service providers. One of the first patterns that Walt discovered was that many large providers, including the phone and cable companies, routinely registered domain names for their customers in the provider's name. Legally, this makes the domain name the property of the provider rather than the customer, since the domain name is considered to be legally owned by the name listed as the domain's registrant. This surprised and shocked Walt and his designer, who has always registered their own customers' domain names in their own name, rather than in his name or his company's name, because he believes the domain name should always belong to the customer, not to the provider. As a result, Virginia Host often finds itself in the role of helping a customer who already has a web site through a yellow pages company or through a cable company to take control of their own domain name.

When it comes to actually designing the northern VA site, our designer approach is quite simple. First, we create a contract with the customer to create 3-5 mockups of the site. We do this to help us zero in on what the customer wants the site to look like. A mockup is an artistic rendering of a site's home page, where none of the links actually work. The purpose of a mockup is to present an overall look-and-feel of the site from an aesthetic point-of-view, so that our customer is satisfied that the site will favorably reflect on their business. The reason why we create at least three mockups is that it's almost impossible to "hit the bullseye" so to speak in one shot. By showing the customer a series of designs, we can narrow in fairly quickly on the "look" the customer hopes for where their own site is concerned.

After the designer mockup is finally chosen and approved by the customer, we begin to write the content for the site and, with the cooperation of the client, pull together pictures. Depending on the customer, we might also recommend the creation of a video on the home page, to improve prospect conversion of visitors to the site once it is live. Finally, and most importantly, we recommend ongoing growth and content addition to the site for maximum search marketing benefit after the designer is done.

If you would like Virginia Host to recommend an appropriate package to do all these things based on your available budget in Northern VA, call us at 540-428-2787.

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