White Label Development Services: Part 2

by GruffyGoat Team written on
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White label design and development services are a great way for marketing and advertising agencies to offer affordable web services to your customers.

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As we discussed in our last post, white label design and development services are a great way for marketing and advertising agencies to offer affordable web services to your customers. You gain the full benefits of a team of development professionals without adding infrastructure, personnel, or other overhead to your firm’s budget. You simply contract the service, pay a nominal monthly fee depending on your needs, and then deliver a creative value-add for your clients through your firm’s branding.

GruffyGoat provides robust white label web development services to many of our customers. This has enabled them, in turn, to add those services to their firm’s portfolio as well as generate recurring revenue through monthly maintenance and hosting fees. To their clients, GruffyGoat is invisible; to the agency, we’re behind the scenes supporting their business and keeping things running smoothly so they can focus on more important tasks.

So, What Does GruffyGoat’s White Label Service Entail?

Our sites are built on WordPress, one of the world’s best and most widely-used content management systems, with a user-friendly interface and lots of features and plugins to accommodate a vast number of configurations. We also offer a deep menu of affordable design themes bursting with style to supplement your creative team.

For a standard monthly fee*, you get…

  • Daily site backups with auto-restore points
  • Firewall and malware scanning
  • Evercache technology and CDN-ready architecture
  • SSL Certificate
  • Ongoing WordPress framework and plugin updates
  • Regular monthly uptime and update reporting
  • High-capacity bandwidth (up to 2GB) and storage (up to 1GB) per site

*Our monthly fee is based on your hosting/migration needs, ecommerce compatibility, and required plugins for your site offerings.

We also provide scalable hourly support services, as needed.

How Much Do White Label Sites Cost?

GruffyGoat’s ongoing hosting and support allows us to offer initial website builds at much lower prices. But lots of factors can contribute to the final price, including:

  • The number and complexity of any site functions
  • Total number of site pages
  • SEO requirements/plugins
  • Advanced customizations
  • Bandwidth and storage needs

Standard pricing also assumes that the client provides all logos, content, branding, etc. We can provide those elements if needed, but additional creative services add to the final cost as well.

Am I Locked Into a Long-Term Commitment?

We only require hosting with us for the duration of the build. Once the site is complete, you can move the site anywhere you want. All our hosting plans are month-to-month and you’re never locked into a long-term contract. You can check out our terms for yourself.

What About Email Services?

You can either set up email at your own company’s domain, or GruffyGoat can provide email services for an additional setup and monthly fee.

How Does the Process Work?

We typically ask for 4–6 weeks to develop a website, but we’ve found that once we establish good workflow procedures with our white label customers, our team can often build out sites within a 3–4-week timeframe (particularly when the designs stick to the Divi builder functionality). We can build sites in less time, but rush fees may apply.

  1. Once a project starts, we build the home page first and then send it to you for review. We include two rounds of revisions during this first phase. 
  2. Upon final approval of the home page, we build out the rest of the site. 
  3. When complete, we send the full site back to you for review and an additional two rounds of revisions on the new pages.
  4. Upon final approval, we launch the site and you are free to move the hosting to your preferred provider.

NOTE: Any out-of-scope design changes or revisions after we’ve received final approval on a process step may result in additional fees. 

The GruffyGoat team believes in good organization and total communication. We have a solid process in place to collect all the site assets together and keep you fully updated throughout the development process.

Contact us to learn more about our white label services. We’d love to partner with you and your team, and be a development resource as you continue to grow your business! 

Glossary of Website Terminology

by GruffyGoat Team written on
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A Record
The A record is the DNS record that tells a server where to send website traffic. At GruffyGoat, when we launch a new website or take over hosting for a client, we typically have the client change their A record to point from their old hosting provider to ours. Changing the A record allows all other non-website related traffic, such as email, to remain intact and unchanged.
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CSS
CSS stands for “Cascading Style Sheet”. A stylesheet is a file (or set of files) on your web server that determines what your website looks like. From font style, to colors and layout — CSS code is added to a stylesheet to define your website’s appearance.
Cache & Cookies
No, we’re not talking about ???? and ????. No doubt you’ve heard the phrase, “clear your cache!”. No matter which one you use, each browser stores temporary files (images, audio, video, stylesheet, etc.), called “cache”, in a folder to help a browser load more quickly. The process of “clearing your cache” is telling your browser to delete these temporary files so that you see the newest version of a website.

Like cache, “cookies” are used to store information related to the user, like IP address, login information, shopping cart history, etc. Typically, you do not need to delete your cookies when clearing your cache.
cPanel
cPanel is short for “control panel”. This is the back end admin screen used by some hosting providers where you can make changes to things like DNS records, SSL as well as access your sites files and database. Some hosting providers, like WPEngine and Flywheel have their own admin screens for managing these items.
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DNS
DNS is like a mail organizer at your home, receiving all types of mail from all different places. Your website constantly receives all kinds of “mail” in the form of web or email traffic, among other things. Each piece of traffic comes into a specific “mailbox”. DNS simply tells that mail where to go, in the form of a DNS records. Web traffic, for example is typically controlled by an A record, whereas email is controlled by MX records. The specific IP address of these DNS records tells that traffic where to go.
Design vs. Development
A website design contains all of the visual elements you see on the site. From colors and fonts to layout and site flow, all aspects of the visual presentation of the site are determined by the designer.

A developer is someone who can take a designer’s vision for a website and make it function correctly on the back end. A developer’s role brings the designer’s vision to life, through interactivity and integration.
Domain
A domain is like the physical address of your house. To get to your house, you have to know your address. For a website, this is your URL, your www, the address you put in your browser to get to your website. Domains are purchased via a registrar, like GoDaddy, NameCheap, etc.
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GoDaddy
GoDaddy sucks. From the quality of their products and services to their support — they’re terrible from top to bottom. Avoid them like the plague. The only thing you should ever use GoDaddy for is registering your domains, and even then, support another company because… GoDaddy sucks. Did we have to put this in our glossary? No. Do they deserve this amount of shade? Absolutely.
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Hosting
Hosting is like a house – it’s where your website lives on the internet. Everything inside the “house” is your website – its design, layout & functionality. When you “migrate” a site, in essence, you’re moving out and moving in to a different house/hosting provider. Just like a house, some hosting providers are way nicer than others. WPEngine is a house in the Hamptons, GoDaddy is a cardboard box in Harlem (in our opinion, of course).
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iFrame
An iFrame is a method where you can load an external source inside of a page/post. The content/data isn’t living directly on the site but is pulled in through a “frame” to display it. A good example of this is a YouTube video embed or Google Map embed — these are iFrames used to display content that lives on another server to your website.
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MX Record
MX is the DNS record that tells the server where to send email traffic. Each email provider (like GSuite, Outlook365, etc.) has their own set of MX records. By adding the providers MX records to your DNS settings, you are letting your server know where all email traffic needs to be routed to.
Migration
Like geese flying south for the winter, “migration” for a website is moving its physical location from one hosting provider to another. There are many different ways to migrate a site, from manually exporting the files and database from one to the other or automated ways, using a plugin. If you’re on a crappy host, like GoDaddy for example, you should definitely consider migrating your site to a more reliable hosting provider. The process may seem daunting, but we can help!
Mockup
A website mockup is a high definition iteration of how a website will look, prior to moving into the development stage. Mockups combine the structure and layout generated during the wireframe stage with the colors/styles created in the style tile phase to present a client with what their website will look like. Depending on the size/scope of a website project, some designers/developers skip the mockup or wireframe stage and move directly into development. There’s no right or wrong way to proceed as long as client approval is received throughout the process.
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Nameserver
A nameserver is a special type of server that houses all DNS records for a domain. By default, when you purchase a domain, your website is automatically assigned the nameserver of that registar. So if you’ve purchased your domain at GoDaddy but want to host your website somewhere else (which you should definitely do!), you can change the nameserver of your domain to point to your new hosting provider. You can also use a service like Cloudflare to manage your DNS settings. Simply put, the nameserver’s job is to house all DNS records for a website.
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Registrar
A registrar a bit like a landlord – it’s where go to purchase and lease your domain name. Typical registrars are GoDaddy, Namecheap, etc. You can also purchase additional services through registrars, such as hosting and email. However, you do not have to host any services through your registrar if you don’t want to. These can all be hosted elsewhere.
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SEO
SEO stands for “Search Engine Optimization”. This is a process of enhancing your website to get website visitors to your site through search engine results.
SSL
SSL is like the fence surrounding your home, protecting it from intruders. For a website, SSL is the technology that establishes a secure/encrypted link between a web server and a users browser. SSL ensures that all data passed between the web server and browser remain private.
Server
A server (or web server) is like the neighborhood where you live. For a website, it’s the physical/virtual place where it resides. The main job of a web server is to display website content through storing, processing and delivering websites to users through a browser. Server space is leased through hosting providers, like WPEngine, Bluehost, Siteground, etc.
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Theme / Template
A theme is a set of prebuilt templates used to define the look and feel of your website. Themes come in all shapes and sizes and also contain different levels of functionality; from flashy animations to full eCommerce themes. Themes are a great way to jumpstart a website project.
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Wireframe
For a website, a wireframe is very similar to a blueprint for a house. They provide an overview of a website’s page structure, layout, user flow, and experience. Wireframes can differ in complexity – from hand-drawn on a napkin to presented in a prototyping tool like XD or Sketch. The wireframing process allows a client to agree on the overall site flow and how the content will be presented prior to moving into full design mockup or development of the site.
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