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Background Products Concept WebsiteBon IT has developed a method for creating websites that is quick, easy and affordable. We offer a variety of ready-made demo websites that can easily be customized to match your brand identity. Each demo website is created for a specific type of business. This means that the optimal structure of your website and the placement of content on the pages has already been thought out for you. All you need to do is provide your own colors, text and images, and Bon IT will create your unique website. This article explains in detail just how easy it is to create a website with Bon IT.
Single page or multi-page website
Building websites is so exciting, because the possibilities are endless. However, the art of building a good website is to keep it simple. For example, you may envision a blog on your website with articles about your expertise, but do you really have the time to write articles on a regular basis? There are too many websites with a blog containing only one article from a couple of years ago when the website was launched. This usually happens because people are too busy with running their actual business to update their website. Paradoxically, a stale blog gives your website visitors the impression that you are no longer seriously involved with your business. As a result, they may turn to one of your competitors who does have a solid online presence. For people who do not have time to maintain their website other than changing a phone number after a year or two, Bon IT offers a single page business card website. Once launched, this kind of website no longer requires any work or maintenance. It just beautifully presents your business online, providing different means for potential customers to contact you, which in turn boosts your revenue.
For companies that do need to update their website on a regular basis, Bon IT offers a corporate website with content management system. It spreads the content of a business website across multiple pages, like a separate “About” and “Contact” page, and contains dynamic page collections, like “Blog”, “Portfolio”, “Services” and “Products”, depending on the theme you choose. Bon IT’s own website is an example of a corporate website. It uses the same technology that we use in projects for clients. Businesses that can benefit from a corporate website are bloggers, agencies, artists, craftsmen, vacation rentals, construction companies and many more. As a rule of thumb, if your business is too extensive to describe in one page, or your offering frequently changes, then a corporate website is your best choice. A corporate website ranks better in the results of search engines than a business card website, because it contains more keywords and information, and because it is regularly updated with current content. This advantage has to be earned by investing your time in actually updating your site on a regular basis. If you need help with your decision between a business card website or a corporate website, do not hesitate to contact us and we will discuss the best choice for your website.
Browse the demo websites
Now that you have decided between a business card website and a corporate website, it is time to select a theme. On the Demos page, select the type of website you want and browse the available themes. You can filter the list of demo websites available for a specific theme. Bon IT is constantly adding new demo websites to the catalogue. If there is no demo website available that suits your needs, please let us know. We will create a new theme for your website for free and give you a nice discount on top of that. If you found a demo website that you like, remember the name of its theme, so you can select it during checkout. Take a moment to appreciate the sheer speed of the demo websites. Your website will be equally fast and it will not get slower over time.
Place your order
After choosing a theme for your website, you can order your business card website or corporate website. In the first phase of the secure checkout (the cart view) select the theme of your choice. If Bon IT has agreed to create a custom theme for you, select “Other” here. Proceed to the next phase of the secure checkout to fill in your billing details. You can pay online with your credit card, via bank transfer, or cash at our office. As soon as your payment has been processed, you will receive an invoice via e-mail and we will get started right away.
Read the instructions
Bon IT will share a Google Drive folder for your project with the email address that you filled in during the checkout process. The top folder contains the user manual that explains how to register a domain name if you have not already and what you should do with the other files in the folder. In case you purchased a corporate website, the user manual will also explain how to create a free Gitlab account, which you will use to log in to the content management system. Bon IT is ready to support you with any of these steps. Creating a Gitlab account to access your content management system may sound odd, if you are used to logging in with an e-mail and a password. The reason is that our content management system stores your website’s data in a version control system called Git instead of a traditional database. This innovative approach has significant advantages like resilience against hacks, website speed and easy back-up and restoration. This is not relevant for business card websites, since they do not come with a content management system.
Replace demo content
The Google Drive folder contains several files. A settings file contains general settings for your website, like the name of your website, the color scheme and links to your social media channels. There is an images folder where you can upload all the images to be used on your website. If you do not have appropriate photos, we can swing by to take semi-professional iPhone photos or schedule a professional photoshoot for you. You can also consider to liven up your website with a (drone) video in the header of your homepage. Then, there is the content folder. This folder contains a text document for every page of the demo website, soon to become your website. In the case of a business card website it will only be one page. Each document has sections for every part of the page. You will see a screenshot of the particular part of the page with text below it that corresponds to the text displayed in the screenshot. This allows you to easily replace the demo content with your own, since you can clearly see what text or image will go where.
Draft website
Once you have replaced all the demo content that you want to replace with your own contant, notify Bon IT via e-mail and we will start building your actual website. When the first version of your website is done, you will receive a link to this draft version. It will allow you to check if the content you provided via Google Drive looks good in the lay-out of the website. You may want to swap out some pictures for better looking ones or shorten some text that wraps across too many lines on small screens.
Feedback round
In addition to the draft website, you will also receive a list of feedback points from Bon IT. This list will mainly consist of technical feedback, like some color combinations causing reduced accessibility, or images that are too large to guarantee optimal performance. Bon IT will not check for grammar and spelling errors in your text. Based on the feedback from Bon IT and your judgement of the draft website you can make changes to your content on Google Drive. When you are done, notify Bon IT via email again. Bon IT will update the draft website with your final changes. Bon IT aims to build a portfolio of top quality projects. So, even though there is only one feedback round before going live, in practice we will take utmost care that your final result will be top of the bill. We designed this standard procedure to prevent getting stuck in an infinite fine-tuning cycle that would not be sustainable or drive up our prices.
Going live
When you are happy with the final result it is time to launch your website. This entails configuring your domain name on Cloudflare Pages, where your website will be hosted. After changing the configuration of your domain name, it can take some time for your website to come online. If you were running an old website on your domain, that website will temporarily become unavailable. Any email account under your domain will also stop working for the same duration. Be sure to inform your audience, via social media for instance, that it is going to happen. A .com domain can be ready within a few hours, while a .cw can take a couple of days to become available again after changing the configuration. This is because .cw domains are manually managed by the University of Curaçao, as we learned the hard way when launching our website.
Aftercare
In the event that you run into any visual or functional bug, or a horrible spelling mistake after going live, Bon IT has your back and we will immediately fix it for you. For bigger changes, upgrades or extension of your website, please request a quote. Bon IT offers a wide range of services that can be provided on an hourly or project basis. All things considered, we trust that you will be highly satisfied with your new website and hope that you will leave us a fantastic review, recommend us to your friends and choose Bon IT again for your next project.
Updating your website
Bon IT builds business card websites that are meant to last for years without maintenance or regular updates. Any future updates to business card websites are billed by the hour or on a project basis. In case you decide that you want to do more with your website, consider upgrading it to a corporate website. Corporate websites come with a content management system. This allows you to easily change colors, fonts, text and images on every page, change the order of sections within pages, and manage translations. If you want to change the structure of your corporate website beyond the limits of the content management system, like custom layouts for some pages, or adding an extra collection of dynamic pages, Bon IT has you covered. Please note that such extra work will also be billed separately in mutual agreement.
Freedom
Bon IT builds websites with open-source technology only, which means that we have full control of every line of code and can change anything to meet your needs. The open-source technology used by Bon IT, combined with a high standard for code quality, makes your website fully portable. This means that you can easily manage your website by yourself if you wish, or transfer it to another agency. We want to give our clients ultimate freedom, instead of locking them in. We believe it is the morally right approach to building websites as well as a healthy basis for long-term relationships.
