Frequently Asked Questions

This depends on the amount of customisation and functionality required but it can take from as little as a week.

A template is a pre-designed concept which has limited customisation. A custom website is a one-off design particularly targeted to your brand and your exact requirements.

If you are a business that sells products or services then having a website should be a major part of your marketing strategy.  Websites target a global market, 24/7 and are usually more cost effective than brochures. Websites are interactive thus proving a visitor to your site with all the information they require to make an informed decision about your product or service.

Yes, if you take our E-commerce option you will be able to sell an unlimited number of products or services online via a shopping cart. Site visitors can add items to their cart as they browse through the services or products on your website. When they are ready they submit their order for processing which can be processed online via a secure payments gateway or stored in a database for offline processing. The shopping cart also allows you to display specials or ‘up-sells’ as part of the checkout process.

We have several pricing options depending on how many pages you would like on your website and the functionality you would like added, for example, a shopping cart, blog module, newsletter module, secure payment gateway. Here is a full list of what is available as added value functions to your website.

All of our options include a content management system which allows you to update your content whenever you want and because it is a web-based programme, wherever you want. It is important that your content is kept fresh and up-to-date not only to demonstrate to the search engines that your site is topical and regularly updated but also to encourage visitors to return to your site.

A Content Management System (CMS) is a tool that allows a site owner to easily manage their own website content. Historically, if you wanted to make a change to your site, you had to ask your website designer to update the site for you. This was often done in the developers own time and at exorbitant rates. Limelight Online CMS puts the control back in the hands of the site owner – you can now update your site from anywhere in the world, whenever you decide and for free.

Limelight Online CMS has been developed to be Search Engine friendly – that is, it comes preconfigured with all the functionality required to successfully market your site with the Search Engines. This is a requirement that is overlooked by most other Content Management Systems and yet is critical to the later success of a website.

Limelight Online CMS has its own built in analytics package that can provide information on some of the common measurable traffic data, or we can integrate directly to Google Analytics from within Limelight Online CMS

While Limelight Online CMS has been built to be industry standard and portable, there may be additional work required to configure Limelight Online CMS to run on your server. We prefer to host on our servers which are preconfigured with all necessary security permissions and supporting libraries.

Limelight Online CMS has been built with security in mind. Whether you are the only person who makes updates to your website or you have multiple users that will each have access to restricted areas of the website, we have already designed the security features you will need.

From a user perspective, Limelight Online CMS is fully web based. All you need to manage the content of your website from anywhere in the world is an Internet connection and a web browser such as Internet Explorer (v6+).

Yes, that is the goal of Limelight Online Content Management System. We put the control of the website back in the hands of the site owner.

Rather than have a one size fits all approach to our software, we have made Limelight Online CMS Modular. This means that we can customise Limelight Online CMS to your specific requirements by bolting on pre-written software modules so that you can get the functionality you need without having to pay for features you will never use.

No problem, Limelight Online CMS is industry standard so can be installed on any server that meets the published specifications.

Search Engine Optimisation(SEO) is what is commonly referred to as 'on-page' optimisation. It involves assessing and removing any obstacles in a website that might hinder its search performance, the loading of key information in specific places on a page and the optimisation of technical areas of a site such as Title tags, Meta description tags, Meta keyword tags, headings, image alt tags, and hyperlinks. Our SEO service also includes full Keyword Research and Analysis using Google Tools.

Search Engine Marketing is the act of promoting a website on the Internet and involves both 'on-page' factors (SEO) and 'off-page' factors such as link building, content based marketing (also known as Article Marketing) and Pay Per Click campaigns (also known as PPC or Sponsored Links) provided through programmes such as Google Adwords and Yahoo! Search Marketing. A Search Engine Marketing service generally also includes keyword research and analysis, the building of site content in service and/or product pages and the use of Business Blogs. Many Search Engines determine the popularity of a website by the number of sites that link to it. This popularity along with a sound 'on-page' optimisation will help a website to gain rankings in the search results.

The most important thing when selecting keywords is determining relevance. Your keywords must reflect your website offering. If you choose keywords that are irrelevant or inappropriate then the chance that your website will ever appear in Search Engine results pages is very unlikely as the Search Engines will deem your website irrelevant to a search query and will not display it. Our Keyword Research data gives us an indication of the search volumes for particular keyword phrases. We then assess the competition by determining how many other websites are competing in the Search Engine indexes for the phrases that you have identified. The goal is to select the phrases that are popular via search volume but are not competing too heavily with other websites using the same phrases. This will give your website the very best chance of gaining rankings and receiving that much sought after targeted traffic.

There are many factors that influence how quickly a website will appear in Search Engine rankings. Predominantly, these are: the age of the domain name, the age of the website, how well optimised the website is, how many inbound links the website has (popularity), which keywords the website is targeting and who your competitors are and how well optimised and popular their website is.

The number of inbound links is a very important factor. Google in particular rewards sites that show a natural increase over a period of time of quality websites linking back to them. Depending on the industry a website competes in, and how new the domain name is, it will take 6 to 12 months of growing inward links to a site to achieve rankings in this Engine. Google gives greater weight to sites that are “popular” i.e. sites that have a large number of quality links to them from other sites. Very simply; the more quality links there are to a well optimised site, the higher it ranks. Google measures the "importance" of a page in its index using its Page Rank methodology, which is strongly influenced by the number and quality of inward links.

Link Building is an ESSENTIAL part of promoting your website in the Google Search Engine.

If you are serious about promoting your website on the Internet then you need to be sure that you are in fact getting a full Search Engine Marketing solution rather than a set and forget approach that Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) on its own amounts to. This does involve an investment both in time and money but when carried out by experienced Search Engine marketers it will result in a return on investment that will increase as your website gains credibility and improves in popularity.

More than fifty percent of all medium size web solutions are completed using PHP web programming and MySQL databases, both of which Limelight Online specialises in. Along with PHP and MySQL, Limelight Online also work with various other types and combinations of the following web programming languages:

• Web server scripting languages: Perl, PHP, ASP, JavaScript, XML and more
• Web client languages: HTML, Java-script, Java applets
• Database products: MYSQL, PostgreSQL, MS SQL, Access
• Programming languages: C/C ++, JavaScript, CGI

Web Development is the practice of creating a website. This always goes hand in hand with web design. Development usually refers to the functionalities of a site, especially the back-end programming, database programming and database design.

No, we will arrange this for you free of charge.

Everything that is available on the Internet exists on servers. Servers are networks of computers that store accessible information and are online 24 hrs a day. Every word, image, audio/video file that is on the Internet is “hosted” on a server. If you don’t run your own server (most people don’t), then you’ll need to purchase hosting from a provider.

SSL refers to a Secure Sockets Layer. Its main application is to ensure security and privacy for confidential transactions made online. We strongly advise the use of a Secure Certificate wherever confidential information is being sent over the Internet. You can either use our certificate for this (if we are hosting your website), or we can arrange to purchase and install one for use on your website alone.

We generally recommend that that you register a domain name in the top level domain space (TLD) of your target market. If you have a UK target audience, then register a .co.uk domain name. If you are targeting purely New Zealand clients, then register a .co.nz domain.

We can provide Linux or Windows hosting although our preferred development environment is Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (LAMP).

All of our hosting plans come preconfigured with email hosting which includes webmail. So long as you have an Internet connection and a web browser, you can check your email from wherever you are.

Our hosting accounts come pre-configured with anti-spam software that can be fine-tuned to your specific requirements.

We don’t recommend having an email catchall on your website because these tend to be a target for spammers.

To uniquely identify all computers on the Internet, every computer is assigned a unique IP Address. IP stands for Internet Protocol and these addresses are normally expressed as a string of numbers (eg. 217.27.61.137). Domain names were developed to avoid having to remember the IP addresses of all of the web sites we visit. Through the use of Domain Name Servers, easy-to-remember domain names are automatically translated to their corresponding IP addresses, allowing computers on the Internet to communicate with each other. Domain names typically have several levels, separated by a dot (ie. a full stop). The right-most level is usually known as the top-level domain, or TLD, and is often represented by a country code, such as .nz.

A Domain Name is merely an address on the Internet. You need to have your website hosted on a server so that you can point the domain name at it. If you don’t own your own server, then you generally need to lease hosting space from a hosting provider. Think of your domain name as the telephone number for the site and the hosting as the rent for the space on which your website is located.

For Search Marketing reasons, we recommend hosting your website in your geographic target market. If your potential clients are based only in New Zealand, then we recommend a New Zealand based server. If you are targeting UK clients, then host in the UK. Limelight Online currently maintain our own hosting servers in 6 different geographic locations including Germany, The Netherlands, New Zealand, UK, USA and Australia.

We aim for a 99.9% service uptime. Like any hosting environment, we need to do occasional maintenance updates that may require taking the server offline but we always aim to do this during periods of minimum traffic.

The Unique Domain Authentication ID, or UDAI, is a randomly generated unique identifier that is required to authenticate requests to transfer domain names from one registrar to another. A UDAI is generated when a domain name is registered, although the domain name's registrar can generate a new UDAI at any time if required. Registrars are obliged to promptly make UDAIs available to registrants upon request and may not withhold them to prevent a domain name from being transferred under any circumstances.

Yes, our hosting plans come preconfigured for email and you can set up as many email aliases as you require.

Limelight Online CMS has a built in email based help desk. Just log your support request from within Limelight Online CMS and we will get back to you within 8 hours with a response. Found something that doesn’t work as it should, let us know and we will fix it – free of charge.