Services

Hosting - We typically offer our hosting services only to design and photography clients referred from Kestrel Designs, to a few non-profit organizations we support and to friends and family. Because our accounts are set up manually, we do not necessarily offer the cheapest rates out there or the fastest technical support.

HOWEVER, if you are looking to pay someone to set everything up for you and are not in a really big hurry, we will consider taking on new clients. We rent server space from HostGator.com where they are dedicated to providing reliable web hosting solutions of the highest quality. All of our plans come with a 99.9% uptime guarantee.

Domain Name Registration - We recommend that you register your domain name with GoDaddy.com.

eCommerce Shopping Cart - For a shopping cart program, we recommend eCommerceTemplates  All product updates and invoicing is done very easily via the control panel that comes with the shopping cart. They can install it on your server for you or you can contact us for custom implementation.

For custom installation and implementation, our clients typically purchase a "Generic" template and then we  pull out the code and instert it  into your site's custom design, and then make sure the programming works seemlessly with your site.

Merchant Account - If you do not already have a merchant account, we recommend opening a business account with PayPal... If your budget requires, you can start off with the free Business Account for now and then upgrade to their full Merchant Account program when you're ready. (We have yet to find any bank that can beat PayPal's price and service.)

SSL Certificates - If you are already ready to go full steam ahead with your eCommerce site and would like to purchase a Security Certificate (SSL), we recommend that you read our article on SSL before you make your certificate purchase.

Note: A full Merchant Account and Security Certificate are not necessary to start selling products on your site, but they do help improve user experience and typically generate a higher conversion ratio for sales.

Website Maintenance - For page content maintenance and updates, we recommend a program called Contribute from Adobe. You install this program on your hard-drive, it connects to your website on your server, and then you can make changes to your pages just like you would on a Word document.

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SSL Certificates In Detail | eCommerce Basics | Complete eCommerce