A Little About Me

My name is Steve Adams. I have a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering and worked 25 years in Silicon Valley as a computer hardware and software engineer before getting hooked on web design. I live in Oakdale, CA now and offer personalized web design and hosting for businesses and practices in the Oakdale, Riverbank, and Modesto area.

I have a good eye for graphics, excellent writing skills, and my engineering background gives me unusual strength in advanced web technologies. And I love to create web sites!

Your business or your practice deserve a professional looking web site that reflects the dedication and energy you put into it. I'll work with you one-on-one to create the best site we can, that says what you want it to say and does what you want it to do. Then I'll host and maintain the site for you.

Putting Up a Great Site Is Only the Beginning

Putting up a great web site is like printing a great business card. You can hand out the URL to people you meet, whether they ask for it or not, and hope they will have an interest later and look at it. If that's all you do with your web site, those are pretty much the only people who will visit your site. But that scenario barely scratches the surface of what the web can do for your business. The real magic of the web happens when you get search engines to show your site to millions of people who have asked for something that you offer. These aren't people you pushed your URL onto. These are people who are actively looking for something that you have.

But this is not easy! Google has 14 billion web pages to consider and you must convince them that your page is among the top ten or so to show to this user. There are no magic words you can put on your site that will drive it to the top of Google's search results because Google doesn't much care what you say about yourself. They look for signs that other people like you before they show your site to their users. The best search consultants charge $250/hour to work a site to the top of search results and keep it there. What they do, basically, is get other people to say, and keep saying, good things about you, in places that Google looks.

What I do for search may not get you higher than people who have a search consultant on their payroll, but it will get you pretty high. (This assumes that you're doing your part by being good at what you do so that people aren't saying bad things about you.)

Have You Lost Control of Your Site?

It's easy to lose control of your web site, finding out, for example, that the company with such a great price shipped the work off to designers in India who stamped it out with a bloated Content Management System (CMS). But now those people in India are no longer available and no one here understands that CMS so your site has become frozen. (This happened to one client who came to me. I was able to rebuild the site from scratch, with many improvements, in a tenth the space with well-known technologies. They now have complete control over a much better site.)

You can also lose control of your site when the friend who put up your site for little or nothing now has a new job and no time to make the changes you want, or has just drifted out of your life. Again, your site has become frozen in a state you're not at all happy with.

I will personally do your web site. Living here in the Oakdale - Modesto area, I can always meet with you personally to chat about your site. I can usually make that small change you want immediately. A $25/month hosting and maintenance fee covers most changes.

If you have a site you've lost control of, let me bring it up to what you want it to be, adding, for example, all those pictures you've been collecting and giving it a more professional look. We can do as little or as much as you like, or do a little each month. I will then host and maintain the site for a minimal cost. My basic rate is $50/hour, but I do a lot in an hour.

My Friend Said She Would Do My Site for $500

It seems that everyone has a "friend" (friend, relative, daughter of a friend, etc. etc.) who took a class in HTML and wants to do your web site. This rarely ends well. Projects that a professional would finish in a couple of weeks creep on for months with no end in sight and no clean exit open to you or to your friend because you're, well, friends.

Building a custom web site looks easy but every way you turn is another wall of detail to understand and manage, and the information keeps growing. To do this well you have to enjoy getting lost in books full of technical detail. (I love it!) A night class in HTML/CSS doesn't get you very far. Consider that the smartest people on the planet have poured 160 IQs into this stuff for 20 years. It's a long climb to get up on their shoulders, no matter how smart you are.

To build a custom page that stands above or even equal to others today you must be comfortable working in many technologies. To make the pages interactive you need to program in JavaScript and jQuery. For quick, dynamic exchanges of data with the server, rather than making users wait for entire pages to reload, you need to work with Ajax. To 1) customize your pages on the fly for different users, 2) communicate with eCommerce transaction protocols, or 3) to generate and fulfil digital orders you need to write scripts that run on the server in a language like PHP. To remember transactions or hold data your users can access you need to set up and manage a MySQL database and understand SQL. To not reinvent any wheels while you design your web site you need to know what software modules and plug-ins are already available and how to integrate them into your site. You need to use something like Dreamweaver, of course, to create and upload your pages to a server, but you also need to be at home with software like Fireworks, for graphics; Firebug, for debugging; Google Analytics, to view and understand the traffic coming to your site; Google AdWords, to plan and manage your pay-per-click advertising; Pay Pal Pro, to set up eCommerce . . . . If you want to employ video you need to understand how to use a good video editor like Premier Pro. For animation you need Flash or SwishMAX, each of which uses still another language, ActionScript.

Nothing here is trivial. What looks initially like putting up a shelf in the garage can easily become more like rebuilding your Lexus transmission.

And then there's site maintenance. Will your friend commit to hosting and maintaining your site, indefinietly? How many times can you ask for more changes when you paid so little? And web sites do and should change - often - as you learn how people react to your site, you think of better ways to say things, new things to say, new images to post, new video to post . . . . In fact, web sites are never finished, as long as you keep thinking about ways to improve your business.

The risk in letting your friend do your web site is that you'll end up with a site that you don't like and that you can't change. And you'll lose your friend.

Your web site is the finial atop years of work building up your business and your reputation. You're better off with no web site now than one that undoes that work by being amateurish, awkward to use, annoying, or just out of date. It takes years to build a solid reputation and only one mistake to destroy it.

When there are ways today to build beautiful and effective web sites that do almost anything, why settle for less?

Conclusion

If you're looking for web site design in Oakdale, web site design in Riverbank, or web site design in Modesto, or the Central Valley let's talk. Or if you have a web site that you want to regain control of and bring up to date, let's talk. I can work with you to stretch out payment over several months. You will be delighted with the results - or you don't pay anything!

Strengths
Some Recent Web Creations

"We are extremely happy with the online menu Steve’s Web Shop created for our restaurant. Our customers tell us they love ordering from it. We highly recommend Steve and his work. He is professional and a pleasure to work with."
Monica and Jim Davis, Cottonwood Café Oakdale, CA www.cottonwoodonline.com

"We’re very happy with the medical web site Steve’s Web Shop put up for us. We gave Steve the basic concept for what we wanted and he was able to implement this beyond our expectations in a short time. In addition, Steve's writing skills helped us to express our message in a clear and professional way. Steve was very easy and enjoyable to work with. We highly recommend Steve and his work."
Hung Bui, Central Valley PET Imaging Center Manteca, CA. www.centralvalleypet.com

"I am constantly amazed by what Steve, at Steve’s Web Shop, is able to do on the web. Steve’s abilities seem endless and the quality and thoroughness of his work have been worth much more to me than what he charges. Steve is also teaching me web design and his lessons are so interesting and informative that I’ve encouraged him to put them into a book. Steve has been a godsend for my business. I highly recommend him."
Erik Quisling, entrepreneur, author and musician Oakdale, CA www.buyabarcode.com , www.upayahouse.com

Steve's Web Shop

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