Site Development


"Back when Bill Crews and I started Vanguard Internet Services in 1995, I took pride in handcrafting every website, and for ten years the available tools were generally not up to the job of developing professional quality sites. That changed in the mid-2000s with the proliferation of a large number of website development environments, many freely available to the open source community such as Joomla, WordPress, and Drupal.

Now it is the exception for me to craft a site by hand, the tools available are just that much better."

Web Development

Websites have been our core business since founding Vanguard Internet Services in 1995. We can help you set up a new site, refresh your existing site, and keep it current.

We develop sites primarily in Joomla and WordPress, though we still have times when hand-coding is done.

We can walk you through the whole process from requirements, to design, to development and content generations, OR, we will do as much as you want us to do. Our clients have a wide variety of desires, some have a specific design that they want us to implement. Some want us to generate a design and populate the site with blank pages that they can then fill in themselves. Whatever your preference, we will work with you.

Site Hosting

We rent several servers that we can host your site on. As with development, we can accommodate a variety of customer preferences for hosting. While we might find it easier to work on our own standard environment, we frequently can support a site that you might already have with your own registrar/hosting company.

Some sites might need to stand on their own, some political sites that might be subject to attack for instance, or a site who hopefully will grow beyond the capacity of a single server and needs to be hosted in the Amazon Web Services cloud. We can do all of those.

eCommerce

We find that the Joomla/Virtuemart combination meets the needs for most of our clients, but if you need Magento or Drupal/Ubercart, or XenCart we can do them as well.

We generally recommend PayPal as the primary payment gateway, they handle credit cards as well as PayPal accounts. If you want more control, we can support a variety of dedicated gateways such as Authorize.net, but there are higher security needs for those solutions and they will cost more to implement and support.

Server and Network Support

Sorry, we don't support Networks, or Servers, but we work closely with a couple of very good firms that we can recommend to you. Hudson Technology Professionals - Mitch Hudson and his team can set up, troubleshoot, and keep your PCs, Servers, and Networks running, where ever you are within the US. If you need advanced SharePoint services, Mitch is your person.

Sanders Consulting - Scott Sanders does desktop, server, and local networking support for small businesses in southern Colorado. He is a trusted partner that I have known for several years.

“You are a God-send for me - it is so thankfully easy and helpful to have your team helping me”

Representative Sites

Sites for  Less Than $ 500

Some sites don't need lots of bells and whistles. Fortunately with over 9,000 Joomla plug-in extensions to choose from it is easy to create a basic site for our clients that is more than just an on-line brochure.

 

Sites for More Than $ 500

With more content and functionality, for instance eCommerce, more effort and cost is involved. Sometimes we buy and modify a commercial extension. We always provide a not-to-exceed quote before starting work so that you won't be surprised with what your site costs.

 

Site Upgrades

Many people get a new website up and running, and then either forget about it, or lose access to the person who had been maintaining it for them. We can frequently fix up a stale site, or migrate it to Joomla so that the site owners can do basic maintenance themselves.