Merrillville Web Design is proud to announce our first web design "retail store" located in the Meijer at 611 W. Lincoln Highway in Merrillville, Indiana. The purpose of this store is to put every Northwest Indiana business online, no matter how small or how affected by this challenging economy. We need to work together to keep Indiana growing - no matter how much hard work it takes! Call 219-932-7483 Today!

• Visit the store web site!

They say that a teenager can do it. Any kid with a PC and time on their hands. But is it really true? Is there any real reason to hire a professional web designer in 2009? We say yes...and here's why.

That means that your project goes live on-time. The only way we could get richer than by building web sites is if we were paid a dime for every project someone told us about that was dreadfully behind schedule. Distant Horizon has circumvented this problem by completing significant chunks of work before the deal even closes. By the time we contract with you the only thing left to do is the customization and tailoring to your specific business rules. There are web design agencies with 150 employees that can't go live as fast as Distant Horizon. There are freelance web designers with only one client that can't go live as fast as Distant Horizon. There are people who teach web design at universities that can't go live as fast as Distant Horizon.

The other day I had to explain to a prospective client exactly how an e-commerce "shopping cart web site" works. It's good for us to think in those basic terms once in a while if only to remind ourselves of how much the technology has developed and how much work has been done in order to ensure that we can build a new corporate or e-commerce web site in 30 days.
So here goes. The only way to tie an e-commerce transaction up with a bow is to...

• Add up the individual prices of each item in the shopping cart to determine the subtotal.
• Determine if sales tax is appropriate based on the address of the shopper; if so, add tax to subtotal. Some states are starting to handle sales tax by county.
• Send the combined weight of the products, along with the zip code of the shopper and the zip code of the e-commerce fulfillment warehouse to UPS in real-time using XML. Instantly receive back the correct UPS shipping fee. Add to subtotal.
• If the item is over 150 lbs., we perform the same zip code process with an LTL truck freight company.
• Once you know what your product total is, you know what your sales tax total is, and you know what your accurate freight calculation is, then you're ready for...

Your teenager web developer will tell you that credit card numbers are safe on a "secure server" but an e-commerce professional will tell you that the internet is a ridiculous place where standards are only now emerging to attempt to protect cardholder information. Our approach to this problem is not to give up on e-commerce, but to give up on storing credit card numbers! We have created our web sites to be "dumb-terminals" that simply pass credit card information on to third party processors. There is nothing worth stealing on our servers. They're like an empty cash register. Sorry hackers, the armored car just left.

If your web designer can't even spell "Attributes" beware! You see, the world of selling products is actuallly a lot more complicated than it looks walking up and down the aisle of your local big box store. What a store refers to as a SKU (stock keeping unit) has historically been handled in a variety of different ways depending upon the sophistication of the supply chain. If you have a wholesale salesperson or a self-service store, sometimes the actual color or size of an item is never important enough to track.

For instance, a store that buys T-shirts by the thousands, may not really care if they have 480 red shirts and 520 blue shirts instead of 500 of each. But on an e-commerce web site, we have to go to great lengths to know the exact sku a shopper is seeking to buy. This sometimes forces us to build extra levels of detail, or what we call "attributes" to show you to avoid the dreadful possibility of you adding the wrong item to your shopping cart on one of our web sites. On an electric motor these attributes would be "volts" and "horsepower" and "RPM" and on a can of spray paint they would be "color" and "size." The key to the Rapid Deployment E-Commerce system is that every product can have as many attributes as it needs...and every product can have its own!

So much of the Search Engine Optimization industry is made up of kids working out of their apartments bragging about how they obtained great search engine rankings on a few phrases for a couple web sites. You can always find phrases for which a site has decent search engine rankings. However, it has been Distant Horizon's responsibility over the last ten years to get good enough search engine rankings for hundreds of web sites over a long enough period of time so that our clients experience a profitable, upward trajectory. We can tell you the difference between trying to get a first page Google ranking for Al Johnson's Swedish Restaurant for words like "door county restaurant" and "swedish gifts" compared with the thankless, hellish job of trying to get rankings for a phrase like "chicago personal injury attorney" or "chicago web design." We can also tell you in intimate detail why a strategy based soley on Pay Per Click advertising, or a strategy based purely on organic "free" rankings are both destined for dissapointment.

Distant Horizon has a ten-year track record of pleasing our clients with the work that we do and our ongoing committment to excellence. Our references speak for us. Our competitors respect us. And we don't take web site projects that we cannot finish. We have grown every year since 1999 and we have self-financed our growth to keep it under control. Of course we would like an air hockey table and an expensive espresso bar in our office, but our clients need something even more exclusive...they need a web design firm that will stay in business for the long haul.

We thought that gnashing of teeth and beating of breasts was only applicable behavior during biblical times, but if you have ever waited patiently for a web site development or software project to be completed, you start to feel like pulling out all the stops on your human angst. That's why at Distant Horizon we are proud that we have dozens of clients who have either hired us to redesign their web site after several years have gone by (like Gallagher & Henry, Castletown Homes and Mia Francesca)...or in some cases clients have had us build multiple web sites for different markets or business models (such as Garvin Industries, Miller Laundry Systems, Bison Gear, Felix Loeb and Topbulb.com). You don't get that kind of repeat business if you are lazy, indifferent or disorganized. You get repeat jobs because you did a good job the first time and there is reason to believe you will do good over and over.

Our philosophy since 1999 has been, "if something goes wrong with your web site, you're going to call us no matter who is hosting it....so we might as well host it ourselves and get paid for the support!" Ten years later, the philosophy has made us one of Illinois and Indiana's most successful full-service combined web design, web development and hosting firms. With 24/7/365 support and 99.987% uptime over ten years, we feel that we offer competitive, secure and reliable hosting service. We must be doing something right, 99% of our clients host with us!