Get more high-paying clients
with a professionally built website

If you’re like most creative professionals, you’d much rather spend your time doing what you do best rather than trying to set up, or fix, a broken website.  After all, your time is valuable, and every hour you spend trying to figure out how to add pages, change copy, or fix a problem is money out of your pocket.

You certainly don’t want to waste a month and a half running around in circles trying to do it yourself, when you could be earning money doing what you love.  Just imagine your clients trying to do what you do, and why they should hire you instead, and you’ll quickly see the logic of hiring a professional to build your website for you.

Besides, the quicker you get it up and running, the sooner you’ll start getting more paying clients.

I’m here to help you with that.

My name is Alan Tutt, and I’m also a creative professional.  Photographer and author to be more precise.  I’ve run my business online for more than 10 years, built dozens of websites, and sold hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of stuff online (both physical products and downloadable ones).  I’ve helped friends build their websites, including membership sites and complete ecommerce sites selling creative services, live performances, CDs, T-shirts, and sheet music.  After all that experience, I can now add “web developer” to my list of creative talents.

This means that I understand the needs of creative professionals, and what makes a GOOD website that will make money for you.

You need a website that will showcase your work without competing with it for attention.  It needs to be easy to navigate, so visitors can find what they are looking for, and be guided to contact you with all the information you need without having to ask the same old questions over and over again.

Your website also needs to present you as the expert you are, and not some 2-bit hack that just came in off the streets.  It needs to convince your visitors that you are worth better-than-average fees, to the point where the first question anyone asks is, “Are you available?”

Your website needs to get the attention of good, high-paying clients who will recognize your talents and hire you on the spot.

Your website needs to be easy to find.  Unlike a physical building, there is no “drive by traffic” for a website.  The closest you can get is a listing in the search engines, and there you have the entire world competing for those top 10 spots.  Luckily, there are many other ways to get traffic to your website, and I can help you get all the customers you could ever want.

What you do NOT need is a website that looks like it was put together by a child, and so confusing that no-one knows what you do.  Unfortunately, this is too often the result when you hire some teenager to build a website for you, or build one yourself without enough training and experience.

Building a quality website requires technical skill and business savvy.  Both are required to create a website that will actually make you money.  If either one is lacking, many great clients will hire someone else — someone who has a better website.

What can a website do?

Before we go much further, I want to take a moment and make sure than everyone visiting this website understands what can be done with a website.  We’re familiar with major websites such as Amazon.com, Yahoo, AOL, and eBay, and all of those demonstrate what can be done if you have an unlimited budget to build the “perfect” website.  But when it comes to building a website with a smaller budget, many folks simply don’t know what to expect.

Here’s what we can do for you.

  • Your website can be a place where you maintain a calendar of events, showing dates you are available and dates you are not.
  • Your website can be a meeting place where your fans and clients gather to show their enthusiasm for your work.
  • Your website can have private areas where only your paying clients have access.
  • Your website can be a place where you keep a blog — a journal of thoughts and discussions you have with the world at large.  Your readers can post comments to your blog (if you allow them to) and interact with you directly.
  • Your website can maintain a mailing list of people who want to hear from you when you have something new to offer.
  • Your website can poll your visitors, and get them to vote on anything for which you want their opinion.
  • Your website can even collect surveys from your visitors, and give you detailed information on what your clients want most from you.  (A great thing if the market is changing and you want to stay ahead of the curve.)
  • Your website can sell merchandise directly to your customers.  You can sell physical products, downloadable products, or membership / subscription products where your customers are charged every month like clockwork.
  • Your website can collect deposits on work to be done for your clients.  It can also collect information needed to do the job, including files your clients upload for you to use in performing your service.
  • Beyond the basics above, your website can save you time and money.  Time, because your prospective clients take their own time to evaluate your work and find answers to their questions, and money because you can buy smaller ads, pointing people to your website for more information.
  • Your website will also help you make more money, because your prospective clients will be more impressed with you and your work, and will be more willing to spend whatever it takes to hire you.
  • Your website will also free you up to spend more of your time doing what you enjoy, and less time selling.

In short, your website can help you make more money, provide better service to your clients, and make your business easier to manage.

What does a good website cost?

As with any creative service, it depends on what you want.  Just as you must determine what your clients want before you can quote them a price, I must also understand your needs before I can quote a price to you.

However, I can give you some rough estimates so you know what ballpark we’re playing in.

A basic website containing a few static pages describing what you do, what you have to offer, and a contact form to get in touch with you can be put together for as little as $100.  For this price, you supply the content for the pages, and I set up the website using your content.

If you want, you will be able to easily add new content, or edit your pages to your heart’s delight.  This is because I’ll set up what is known as a CMS (Content Management System), which makes adding and editing pages as easy as writing an email.  If you can do email, you can add and edit pages with a CMS.  Of course, if you’d rather just have me do all the updates for you, we can work out a fee schedule depending on the number of updates you need each month.

You will have a wide variety of visual templates to choose from.  (The layout of this website uses one of the available templates.)  If you want a customized visual appearance to your website, that can be arranged.

If you want more than a basic website, you can get a full ecommerce-enabled website for as little as $500.  Again, for this price, you would provide all of the content for the site, and I’ll put it together for you.  With a full ecommerce website, you can sell products, run a newsletter, take surveys, host ads (both on your site and on other websites), include audio/video on your website, and a whole lot more.

If you need help creating the main content for your website, I can help you there too.  I can write introductory text, short articles, brief product descriptions, longer “sales pages”, and more.

Pages like the one you’re now reading are called “sales pages” because they are designed to sell a product or service.  There is a structure to them, which describes what you do in a way that attracts the attention of those who may be interested in what you do, and gives them enough of the right kind of information to help them make the right choice to hire you.

Those who write such pages for a living are called copywriters.  Copywriters generally charge between $1,000 and $10,000 to write a quality sales page.  The price range depends more on the customer than it does on the quality of writing, although that has an influence on price as well.  Obviously, it’s a lot easier to get $10,000 from a Fortune 500 company than from a solo entrepreneur.

If I were to create a page for you like the one you’re now reading, it would run you about $750.  That’s because it’s a relatively short “sales page”.  The price also covers incidentals, such as corrections, tweaks, and other things.  I’m also not greedy, and I make the majority of my money from selling my own products from my own websites.

There are other options between the examples above.  I just mentioned these because they define a range of prices to expect.

Are there any other costs involved?

A website needs a home.  Online, this is called your “domain name”, and usually includes a “.com”.  This website’s domain name is “keywebtools.com”.

You’ll need a domain name and a place to host it.  Domain names cost $10 per year.  As you may have guessed, I can help you pick out a great domain name for your website, and can help you register it so no one else gets it.

Hosting fees are usually charged by the month, and start around $5 per month and go up from there.  Things that make one hosting account better than another include the reliability of the server hosting your website — whether it’s always available, or whether it disappears any time the wind blows.  How much space is available for your website is also a factor in choosing a hosting account, as well as a variety of other technical details.  There are many cheap hosting services out there, but as with most things, you get what you pay for.

While you are perfectly free to have your website hosted anywhere you’d like, I offer hosting services starting at just $10 per month (or $100 per year when paid up front), with unparalleled reliability and professional features.  A basic hosting account gives you more than enough space for most websites.  If you need lots of space for audios and videos, I have larger accounts available too.

Guaranteed Results

My policy with everything I do is simple — you either love what I do for you, or you get your money back.  Period.

With my web development services, I charge a reasonable deposit up front (25% of the estimated fee), and the balance when you approve the final result.  If you don’t like the final result, and I can’t make it work for you, I’ll refund your initial deposit, and we’ll part friends.

What now?

If you’ve read this far, you’re ready to take the next step, which is to contact me to get a quote for creating (or updating) a website for you.

Here’s what I’ll need from you:

  1. What is your creative specialty?  (author, speaker, artist, entertainer, photographer, model, graphic designer, musician, actor, etc.)  Some details about what you offer to clients would be helpful.
  2. Do you have products to sell?  If so, are they physical products, or may they be downloaded?
  3. Do you currently have a website?  If so, what is the URL?  (i.e. – where can I see it?)
  4. What would you like your website to do?
  5. Will you supply the content for the webpages, or do you need help with that?
  6. What is your budget for this project?  Is this an absolute budget, or does it have some flexibility?
  7. Does your website need to be ready before an upcoming deadline?  If so, what is that deadline?

The best way to send this information to me and get the ball rolling is to use the Contact Form on this website.  The above list of questions is repeated on the Contact page for your convenience.

At this time, I do not need any of the actual content that will go onto your website.  We need to meet first (even if only by email) and find out if we are compatible with each other.  Once I know what you need from me, and I’ve given you a quote on what it may cost, and we’ve both agreed to the terms, then I’ll ask for any materials you have for the website itself.

When I get your information, I’ll evaluate whether I think I can do a good job for you, and send you more information to help you evaluate whether I’m the right person for you.  If we’re a match for each other, the rest of the process will be easy.

I’m looking forward to working with you.

Thanks.

— Alan Tutt, your web developer