The Google Maps module is now live for all Delaware.Net CMS/Ecommerce customers as a free, automatic upgrade.    These automatic feature upgrades come about once per month (or more frequently), and this is one of the major benefits of using our CMS over other open-source solutions.    Free upgrades, free support, free training, and better integration.

Training videos for the new Google Maps builder are being uploaded today, so you will be able to see training videos directly in our on-demand help system.

Here are answers to the most common questions about accepting payments in real-time through your website:

Question:  “Can I easily accept payments through my website?”
YES!  Our Content Management System (CMS) has a built-in payment form system that makes it very easy to accept payments through your website.   You can even have multiple payment forms and run the cards in real time.

Do I need an ecommerce store to accept payments?
No.  You just need a form that can process the forms through a payment gateway service, such as Authorize.net

I have a merchant account from (Heartland, Wilmington Trust, PNC, etc.), isn’t that all I need?
No.  Your merchant account allows you to accept cards, but it doesn’t automate the transaction.  That is why you need a payment gateway.

But my merchant account provider (or bank) told me that this is all I need…..
They usually aren’t well versed with online transactions.  You still need the payment gateway.

What if I already have a different payment gateway from Authorize.net?
First make sure you aren’t talking about your merchant account.  If you are sure that you have a payment gateway account, then we can probably integrate whatever you have for free.   We integate with most popular payment gateways.  Simply let us know which one you are using.

How much is an Authorize.net account?
The price varies, because they are sometimes bundled with merchant accounts, but plan on spending a little over $100 for setup, then $10 per month, and 15 cents per transaction.  That is the normal cost for running cards in real-time.

How fast can you setup this payment form for me?
If you are already using our CMS-Logic system to run your website, then it will take less than a day.  Make sure you have your Authorize.net transaction ID ready to go when you come to us for setup.  If you aren’t using our CMS-Logic system to manage your website, it is still possible for us to place a payment form into your website, but it will take a few more days.

Who should I call for this?
Email our sales team at “sales-at-delaware.net” and we will contact you.

The new interface for the website was designed within the first week of the contract signing, and will begin moving online very soon.

Cities interested in upgrading their websites and gaining better management tools are encouraged to contact Delaware.Net at 888-432-7965, or you can inquire for a quote on our website at http://www.delaware.net/free-web-design-quote/.   Examples of our applications for municipalities can be found online at http://www.civic-logic.com.

Here are some of the differences between us and our competitors;

MUNICIPAL WEB DESIGN PRICING
Some municipal website design companies package websites into flat fees based on the number of citizens that live in the city/town in question.   This flat-rate pricing doesn’t work because smaller cities end up overpaying for their website, and larger cities end up paying more for add-on website modules to get a complete solution.    Delaware.Net’s fees for municipal websites is usually less than these other companies, and our proposals are more accurate because they are customized for each site.  Our one-time development fees for municipalities have ranged typically from $8000 for a smaller municipality up to $30,000 for a very large site (included dedicated servers, backups, GIS integration, and much more than the average website), with the average Delaware.Net project being closer to $10,000.   You could always spend much, much more, as evidenced by this quote given by CivicPlus.

3-YEAR TERM CONTRACTS?!?!
Other firms bundle design pricing with hosting over multi-year terms, selling the website services as a lease.  This can trap the municipality with a vendor over a long period of time, limiting their options.     A small city website project that we just won was quoted at $27,000 for a 3-year project from CivicPlus.   Our contract was under $9,000 for custom design and development, training, an Intranet, a request tracking system, email newsletter system, consulting, and more. We bill for our projects in three or four payments, so this is much more affordable.  We saved that small city over $14,000, and their site will also be completed much faster on our more powerful CMS.

CITY WEBSITE DESIGN
One of the challenges of building a custom website on a CMS is how to make the site not appear to look like a template.   If you look at the city website for the City of Cheyenne, Wyoming, you can see how a city website can look like a very plain, template-based website.  Should every page of your city website have a kid on a skateboard at the top of the site?   This is the difference between our company and others.   Our designs are custom, and we are not cranking out cookie-cutter designs.   Many times we hire local photographers at each city to get the best possible result.

CIVIC LOGIC CMS
Marketing speak aside, you have to really demo a Content Management System (CMS) before you buy it.  Your CMS is where you will be spending a lot of your time managing your website.    When you try these systems, ask yourself – “how easy will this system be for my employees to use?”.   If a system requires 6-12 clicks to accomplish editing a page, and our system takes 2-3 clicks, ours will save your employees a LOT of time over the other system.  All CMSs are not created equally.   We spent quite a bit of time looking at competing CMS solutions before we built ours, and it took us two years to get it just right.   Some systems, like CivicPlus, are simply a page management system for your website.  Others, like our CivicLogic system, are designed to be a true Intranet (secure staff website) for your staff, as well as being a CMS.    With a true Intranet website, you can securely add personnel documents, resources, file, pages, calendars, news, messaging, and much more for your staff.   Each department in your city can have their own private calendar and portal to share information.   This will save your municipality time and money, and get better adoption of the whole system from your staff.

MONTHLY CITY WEBSITE HOSTING FEES
Hosting from CivicPlus last year was generally $600 per month before they went to their bundled pricing.  That is a steep fee that still didn’t include all of their available modules. For example, you would have to spend another $100 per month AND a $1500 setup fee if you wanted their request tracking system.  A request tracking system is a VERY desirable system because it can be used to track complaints from citizens.  Our system includes a better request tracking system at no additional cost, a mass email newsletter system, and a real Intranet system for $150 per month.  That is a savings of $6600 per year!  For a better system!   It obviously isn’t all about price, so you should test both systems to see what is better for your city.

MOVING AWAY FROM CIVICPLUS
If you paid for a CivicPlus website, and you are tired of overpaying for your monthly fees, we can help.   Generally speaking, we can move a CivicPlus website to our CMS, Intranet, Newsletter, Request Tracking, and even our Project Management Module in a matter of two weeks.   The cost to move your site would be very low, and you would recoup that fee in a matter of a couple of months because our hosting fees are so much less than CivicPlus.  Your design files would also remain intact, so you wouldn’t have to pay for a new design.

FOR MORE INFORMATION
Contact Me at 888-432-7965 x100 if you have any questions.   If you are looking to have a new website for your municipality, or if you are interested in moving away from an expensive CivicPlus solution, you can get a quote from us online using our free online quote form.

A lot of our customers need to create Adobe PDF documents so that they can upload them into their websites (using our content management system), and also so that they can send them as email newsletter attachments.

There are several free PDF generators on the market, but the one that I like to use is called PDFCreator. It is an open-source project on SourceForge.net, and it works great. After you download and install the program, it becomes a print driver for Windows, so that you can create a PDF in any program that you use in Windows. So if you are working on a MS Word document, you click “print” and then “PDFCreator”. The program does the rest. Keep in mind that you won’t have all of the PDF markup and editing features that you would get if you bought the full version of Acrobat (Adobe’s program that creates PDFs).

Enjoy!

There ARE cheaper open source solutions out there, and on the low end you have systems like Drupal, PHPNuke, PostNuke, .netNuke, Joomla, and others. These can be made to work if you have the time and patience, but for the most part they are solutions for non-profits and companies that don’t want to spend a lot on their website design work. I would never recommend them for a growing business that really cares about their website. Especially if they don’t have an in-house IT team. These low-end systems are well suited for a website where it is OK to use design templates for someone that wants to get up and running quickly. But there WILL be problems when using these systems, and like everything else – there is a trade-off.

Quality, Speed, and Cost – Choose Two!

If you go with a low-end CMS system, it might be fast to setup, and the price might be right, but your website will be a low-quality website. And if you factor in the time to customize it, that could then get expensive in a hurry.

Care should be taken to avoid a web design firm that charges a premium price for custom website development, then they turn around and install Drupal or some other low-end open system for their CMS solution. This is a way that a web desing firm can cut corners, and it is lying. We would never do this.

Another problem with the low-end open solutions is that they are higher profile targets for hackers. There are many examples of this that you can search for that show Drupal getting hacked, and other systems getting hacked. This is usually quite preventable if the systems are updated in a very regular manner, but the fact of the matter is that web desing companies that outsource their IT and hosting needs are much more likely to NOT update these systems. They build websites using these systems so that they can get them live quickly and turn a profit, but then the site (and the customer) gets neglected. This problem extends beyond CMS systems – it is also true of forum software and blog software.

Am I against open-source software? Heck no. We have our share of open-source software that we use at Delaware.Net, but there IS a trend away from it almost across the board, from operating systems to web development software, to application server software. Open source software is great if it is patched regularly, and if it meets a particular need. But sadly, most companies don’t do a very good job of updating.

Some folks assume that open-source software is somehow better because it is free and open, but this is just not true. To me, it is irresponsible for a web development firm to perpetuate that myth. Open source solutions shouldn’t be viewed as a software religion, they have to make business sense too. And when you actually track the time that it takes to make some open software work correctly, you find that it doesn’t always save you money in the long run. You also might be missing out on integration with your other business systems. Customers looking for a “quick and dirty” way to deploy and manage their websites might do OK with some of these solutions, but “quick and dirty” isn’t what our company is about.

So, you can go cheap with your CMS solution, or you can get one that is more custom to your needs, integrates with a nice custom design, and that doesn’t force you to log into three different interfaces to get your work done. And best of all your site will work better, and it will come up high in search engines.

Another advantage of our systems over other CMS systems is that ours is updated every month, with updates being seamless and free. Try geting your open-source system updated for free indefinitely by your hosting company (it doesn’t happen).