DC Web Design

Website Design has become a passion of mine. I have been building websites for about 8 years. It all started when we began breeding Curly Horses back in 1997. I set up a very simple website for our horses and I loved doing it. My skills were limited for doing anything too professional so we hired a website design company to create our very first OMD Embroidery site. We paid close to $8K for that site back in 2000. Unfortunately, we had no control over it and we paid a pretty penny for yearly maintaince fee and high editing fees. I slowly began to improve my skills and enrolled in some online courses to learn Dreamweaver MX. In 2002, we decided to take control of the site and see if we could edit it on our own. It was much more involved than I thought but I was up for the challenge. There was a big difference between a fun little curly horse site and a professional site that had to draw traffic amidst a very competitive market. Since that day, I have learned so much and technology is always changing so constantly educating myself is really important. I realized that there is more to web design than just creating a pretty looking site. You have to understand what makes a site user friendly but also search engine friendly as well. I put together a few of my current websites below. I am most proud of the first four, because they were built not just for eye appeal but also for improved search engine rankings, especially google.

If you are interested in having a website creating, feel free to contact me denise.conroy@gmail.com

Inspiration Photography Etc.

Scenic Prints, Graduation Portraits and events. Owned by Tracy Conroy.

Costs: This site is very elaborate with more than 70 pages total. Oodles of photos, garment details and custom buttons. Initial set up cost on something like this would run about $1,000.

Cost: This site sort of evolved over time. I wanted it to be set up completely different than a typical page. Lots of fun graphics and links. Average cost: $100 per page.

Cost: Initial set up of a site like this starts at $500 on up. Linda wanted something fun and unique so we added alot film strips & graphics. Linda likes to keep her pages updated regularly and has doubled her number of pages over the past year. All photos are created by Linda to make this site truly special.

Cost: In my frustration of the boring generic blogging templates, I decided to create my own. I learned a little bit about scripts and comment links, which was fun. Initial set up of a unique blog site: $500. It is probably not so practical at this point for anyone other than myself...but it was fun putting it together. ;-)

Cost: I donated my time to set this site up for a local horse club a few years ago. I also edited it for free which usually meant just uploading the yearling trail rides, some pics and monthly newsletters. This year I have had to charge for my time which for simple yearly edits (for nonprofit clubs) is $150/year.

Eastern Upper Peninsula Horseman's Association

This is a local Open show circuit club that wanted a simple website to inform members of the latest information. It wasn't vital that they rank high on the search engines or have loads of content.

Cost: I donated my time for this local horse club as well. This was the beginning of my attempt and trying new graphic layouts and jazzy colors. This site, like the one above didn't require anything too complex, so set up would have been around $300. Yearling edit fee: $150

Cost: Don't laugh. This site was thrown together in about a day. It is uploaded to a free server and is nothing at all special. But I wanted to show you how basic you can get! ;-) Cost on something as basic as this would be $50 per page. The paypal cart was the most time consuming part of this entire website.