Our Services

 
Dispensary Web Apps is here to design, develop, and maintain enterprise web systems for your compassion center or grow shop. 
 

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Dispensary web apps SPECIALTIES

We’re masters of web development, design, e-commerce, automated systems and analyics.

Custom Branded Dispensary Websites

Bring the character of your Compassion Center to life with custom branding, elegant designs, and dynamic content features.

E-commerce &Application Systems

Sell anything from merchandise to event tickets with our dynamic E-commerce websites or help your patients out by automating the medical marijuana and caregiver application process.

Advanced Online Analytic Services

Analyze information about your online users, track their engagement with your website, and figure out the ROI of your online expenditures.

how we work

We work with your desires and your budget. Request a proposal, discuss a contract or hire us hourly!

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Contract Basis

Best suited when you know what you want. Ideal if you’ve already hired a designer or brand development company and just need their materials arranged on your website. Perfect if you already have a website and just need a specific functionality added to it – such as a patient signup form.

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Per Hour Basis

For open ended projects with a subjective aesthetic aspect like brand and logo development, content creation, image or icon sourcing. For small projects – such as adding a mailing list signup to a website.

Who we work for

We work for the best in the cannabis business and know the tricks of the trade to help you succeed.

Consultants

We work for large publicly traded companies to fulfil their clients needs.

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Designers

We can make your designs shine on our fully custom websites. We customize each page so that the design is optimal for mobile viewing, tablet browsing, or traditional desktop surfing.

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PR firms

We can execute your strategies and display your content for your clients.

Dispensaries

not only do we deliver what you want – we also can educate you along the way so that you know you are making the best decisions when it comes to website design, social media interactions, and patient communication.

why we’re special

We provide quick and constant support, work with the top cannabis softwares and are ready to work for you!

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How We Support

We offer in person training to use our systems as well as training thru screen shares and video chat. We can also make video tutorials or pdf instruction manuals which is good for situations in which different employees will be using the same system rather than one dedicated person. We answer our phones and provide phone support. Try me – 401-787-3483 .

Who we work with

We integrate with the most popular softwares in the industry, such as MJFreeway, Biotrack, Weedmaps. We also can integrate your websystems into other popular software such as Mailchimp, Quickbooks, etc.

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When to hire us?

Pre-launch: Coming soon page, mailing list signup, logo design etc

Launch: Patient sign up , online menus, social media integration, kiosk express order systems, SEO

Post  launch: Ecommerce, online pre-order systems, customer retention thru Iphone/android app and push notifications, SMS messaging, marketing emails

More than a Website

It is 2018. Simply a nice billboard on the internet will not keep your customers coming in the door. We can setup services that improve your customer’s’ experience.

HIPAA Compliance

– Securely and safely, send and receive patient information
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Ease of Application

– Patient directly into submittable PDFs

Stay in Touch

-App Icon with contact info that launches website when network is available. Text message or email your patients directly from your web app dashboard. Email marketing made simple.

Get your Team Involved

– Blogging, shop keeping, inventory management, social media integration and more

Mix it up

– Update your websites slideshow and content right from your phone

Get Feedback

– Ask and improve with customizable contact forms

Enticing Menus

– Display the quality and diversity of your products

Virtual Tours

– Let your prospective customers step through your door (in a sense)
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SEO made Simple

– We make what can be a vague guessing game into a step by step process.
CASE STUDIES

Plans and Pricing

The packages below should give you a sense of some of the more generic services we offer and our prices. We build custom websites and each project is unique. Therefore, we encourage you to contact us for a free one hour consultation about websites during which we can give you a refined estimate of what you’ll need to spend to accomplish your goals.

Opening Soon Website

$150
  • responsive design
  • universal browser compatibility
  • contact form
  • mailing list signup form
  • optimized page loading
  • visitor survey
Sign Up

Informational Website

$1,200
  • age verification
  • responsive design
  • universal browser compatibility
  • 3 homepage designs
  • up to 10 additional pages
  • product and service listings
  • contact forms
  • mailing list signup
  • map showing business(s)
  • social icon links
  • sitemap (for SEO)
  • Updates and Support
Sign Up

Marketing Website

$2,400
  • Custom Informational Website
  • Blogging Platform
  • Signups to Multiple Mailing Lists
  • Syndicated News Feeds
  • Social Media Integration
  • Comprehensive Product and Service Offering
  • Contact Pages for Multiple Branches, Stores, or People
  • Google Analytics w/ Conversions and Attribution Models
  • Google Webmaster Account
  • Advertising Conversion Pixel Installation
  • Email Marketing Results Incorporated into Google Analytics
  • Training, Update and Support
Sign Up

Ecommerce Website

$2,900
  • Custom Informational Website
  • Accept Credit Cards
  • Accept E-checks (Bank transfers)
  • Competitive Processing Rates
  • Shipping System Integration
  • Accounting System Integration Correspondence
  • Email Customization
  • Ecommerce Migration From Any Platform
  • Bulk Product Uploads
  • Recurring, Membership Payments
  • Coupons, Promotions
  • Enhanced Ecommerce Analytics
  • Training, Updates, and Support
Sign Up

Training and Support

We love to hand clients the “keys” to their website so that they can change the slideshow, make blog posts, and keep the content up to date. We can teach you in person, through screen sharing, or by making guides specific to your website. If you are super busy person and dont  have the time or the staff to make changes to your own website, we will be happy to make changes and additions for you.

Updates

We provide updates for all the websites and web apps we create and host. Updates include upgrading the underlying web development frameworks that power your website whenever they are released. Sometimes by updating the underlying framework additional softwares that make your site or app function, such as the ecommerce system, may also need to be updated to remain secure and compatible. We consider these mandatory updates and therefore they are included in our monthly hosting fees.

Hosting

We host our websites and web apps on WPEngine. They provide professional ‘managed hosting’ which means they handle web page compression, loading optimizations, content delivery networks, mirroring, and security. Please contact us or WPengine for more details about hosting. If you already have a hosting account or prefer to host with a different company, we will accommodate your needs.

Changes and Additions

For changes to your website please contact us to discuss. Before commencing with any changes, we will itemize the tasks you request, review your current website, and then provide you with a preliminary estimate. For major additions and changes to your website’s functionality, we will need to have a discussion, then write a proposal with ballpark figures and have a follow up discussion, before calculating a preliminary estimate. Any variability in our estimates will be attributed  to specific unknowns, which in some cases you may be able to help mitigate.  For example, in some cases, a rather subjective task, such as acquiring photography by selecting and purchasing stock images, could be handled by you or your staff if desired.

 

Backups and Security

We host all of our websites and apps on WPengine. They make daily backups of each website and take numerous steps to make sure your web system is as secure as possible. They also provide a high level of security through their partnerships with companies like CloudFlare Inc. Through partnerships and subscriptions, WPengine maintains collective blacklist of hacker IP Addresses, which prevents many perpetrators from even communicating with your server. WPengine hosts mirrored copies of your website at different server location, so if there is ever a network (infrastructure) disruption, your site won’t go down. WPengine provides fabulous phone support and they are very transparent about any potential issues that they are experiencing upstream, downstream, or internally. Please contact us to learn about the other measures Dispensary Webapps and WPengine takes to secure your web system.

 

Logo Design and Branding (Starting at $200)

Logo design

Font pairing

Color scheme

Transparent images

Vector graphics

Favicon

Email template

Icon selection

Icon design

Electronic Application Add-on (inquire for pricing)

HIPAA complaint

Electronic PDF Forms

Electronic Signatures

Accept Payments

Direct to Printer

Direct to Email

Multi-page forms with progress bar

 

Customer Support Add-on ($100 – $500)

Customer Feedback Forms

Questionnaires or Surveys

Testimonial Submission

FAQ Page

Product Review

 

SSL Certificate Installation

$10 for RapidSSL (which is $49/yr)

$50 for Installation of other SSL certificates

 

SSL certificate is necessary for transactions to take place within your website (otherwise checkout must occur on payment processor website). SSL certificates encrypt correspondences between your website visitors and your website (server). In 2011, Google noted that SSL certificates are factored into its pagerank algorithm and are therefore important for SEO.

 

Data Analytics Services

Visitor Data Overview and Half Hour Introduction to Google Analytics ($149.00)

Visitor Data Analysis Report and One Hour Discussion ($149.00)

Custom Analytics Dashboard and Experiment Setup (Inquire for Pricing)

 

Additional Services:

Text Messaging Website Integration

You can now text messages your customers and patients right from your administration dashboard. Text messages are viewed about 97% of the time and have a much higher click through rate than promotional emails.

 

Online Chat with Website Visitors

If you have the time or if you have an employee on a computer, you may be a candidate for an online chat widget. This feature can let you engage on a personal level with your website visitors (especially the ones who are in town, have been to your website multiple times, or have spent a long time browsing. ) A friendly message can be the difference between getting a new patient versus losing a potential customer.

 

Email Marketing Systems Setup

If you are just getting started with email marketing, we can help you get setup with services like MailChimp, Aweber, and Constant Contact. If you are well established business with lots of customer’s emails, then it may be time to upgrade to Mandrill and SendGrid. Contact us today to discuss your needs.

 

 

Frequently Asked Questions

Warranty and Refund Policy
While we host your website we pledge to keep it accessible and functioning smoothly. If we do not host your website, we offer a 3 year warranty that your website will function smoothly.

This warranty however is invalidated if you have additional work performed on your website by other people or companies.

Intellectual Property
Any materials you provide us remain 100% yours. Any designs we create for you are 100% yours. The intellectual property of anything we buy or acquire to create your website such as stock photography, icons, and fonts; usually is retained by the original author.

This means that you cannot sell their work in isolation (ie you can sell your website but you cannot just sell the stock slide show image.) For our clients with ecommerce websites, some of the additional softwares (such as a UPS shipping calculator or Quickbooks Integration) require software licenses to update.

Therefore, if we do not host your website you will need to buy your own licenses to eventually update the softwares powering your website.

HIPAA Compliance Security
HIPAA applies to dispensaries. Essentially, you must be careful with patient information. Patient data must be encrypted while in motion and at rest.

If you are storing patient information, detailed access logs to this info must be kept for at least 3 years. Now, don’t get too worried- for most dispensary websites HIPAA does not apply.

For example, if a visitor to your website searches in your search bar for a symptom, to see whether marijuana may be an appropriate medication, the search query is not directly tied to the patient’s name. (Their search is, however, tied to their IP address, so having an SSL certificate to authenticate and encrypt communication with your websites server is a good idea. )

Please, contact us to discuss whether your current web system is compliant.

Do I need a new website?

Does your website serve your business objective?
The goal of your website should be well defined and may be similar to one of the below examples:

  • Enable people aware of my name or business to find and contact me.
  • Attract visitors in my general location to my business based upon keyword searches.
  • Provide scalable customer support through my website.
  • Improve customer retention and loyalty by having a website with ever-evolving content and two way communication.
  • Sell products, streamline shipping, and improve customer support through my ecommerce website.
  • Monetize or retain my social following by having my website as a central hub.
  • Mockup an idea into a functional web app in order to woo investors and find partners.
  • Get email signups via an attractive landing page for an upcoming product launch.
  • My website is used for bookings and reservations.
  • My website is used for receiving payments for goods or services.
Does my website load quickly?
A website should begin loading within 1 second and complete loading within 2-4 seconds. The rule of thumb used to be that webpages should be smaller than .5 megabytes but now with page compression and content delivery networks webpages can be between 2 and 10 megabytes and still load quickly.

Visit Pingdom or webpagetest.org and see how long it takes for your site to load. Yslow.org gives a list of 23 load time improvements that can be implemented. Google’s speed test will also analyze your site and tell you what improvements you can make for it to load faster.

How can I make my website load faster?
  • Use appropriate sized and formatted images to maximize your content to webpage size ratio.
  • Use page compression (such a gzip compression).
  • Serve static content from caches rather than have your server build the same webpages over and over each time the webpage is visited.
  • Specify expiry times for content, so that your visitors browsers store your content, making their browsing experience much faster.
  • Load your webpages so that the meat and potatoes (ie html content) arrives in the browser first followed by the functional code which, for example, runs your slide show. You can also asynchronously load content from multiple servers so that the webpage may load and then a few 1/10s of a second later the functional (javascript) aspects and photos load.
  • Compress (or “minify”) your css and javascript files (rather than have lots of css files that bring out the design of individual elements of your site, cut and paste these files together and load them once.)
  • If you’ve got a lot of content (ie videos, photos, etc) use a Content Delivery Network rather than just one server to send content to your visitors.
  • Make sure your DNS lookup is fast and doesn’t route you through any superfluous name servers.
  • Chose high quality hosting and ask if they will do some of the above things for you.

 

What is Web Development
The process of defining the objective of your website, rebuilding (or creating) your website, and testing whether your objective is being achieved.
What is Website Hosting
The service of making your website accessible through the internet (so that it is not just a bundle of files sitting on a hard drive.)  

What actually makes a website?

CSS Files
Cascading Style Sheets add the design accents to your content
JQuery Files
These files bring the browsing experience to life by enabling your site to easily have cool little functional widgets like these tabs.
HTML Files
Hyper text markup language is what your web browser understands- its the underlying language of the internet. Your website’s platform, such as WordPress, makes html webpages to send to your visitors.
PHP Files
These are files on your server that produce html web pages usually by grabbing information from your database
SQL Files
These are your database’s files which hold the content of your website. They are a pretty much like nested spreadsheets.
SSL Certificate
A “Security Socket Layer” adds the “s” to the https:// you see in the top of your browser. Having an ssl certificate means that communication to and from your website’s server is encrypted. SSL certificates are needed if you’d like to accept credit cards directly through your website and SSL certificates may also give your website a little SEO boost.
DNS Settings
Domain Name System (DNS) settings are used to hardwire your website system into the internet and essentially overwrite your servers’ IP adresses. “Pointing” is the term for setting your DNS record to an IP Adress of a server. If you use additional services provide by your Domain Name Registrar (most often email) then you would only set the A Record (Adress record), one component of the DNS settings, to point torwards a server hosting only your website. If a seperate server runs your email, then you will need to point your MX Records to this servers IP Adress. If your web developer provides email, hosting, and hosts multiple sub-domains (subdomain.yoursite.com) for you; then usually the developer will request to point your entire DNS record to the server.

How can I get more visitors to my website?

SEO: Search Engine Optimization
Search Engine Optimization is the process of tweaking your website so that it appears more in search engine results and higher up in search engine rankings.  
Meta Tagging
The process of adding more information to your website that is specifically tailored so that search engines can better understand your content. For example, how can a search engine know what is in a picture? You can name the file appropriately, add an alt tag, a description tag, a caption tag, and the image can contain additional metadata like the author, the date taken, and whether other people can use the image or if it is copyrighted. Thats a lot of work for one image so we’d only suggest doing this for content that will be on your site for a while.
Back Linking
Is the process of getting links back to your website. This is a critical part of SEO. If you can get popular websites to have clickable links back to your website, not only will you get visits from that website, but you’ll also be sending the message to Google that your website has valuable content worth linking to. This will bring your website higher up in search results and the link text will influence what the search engines interpret as your keywords.
Internal Links
Links within your website- often going from your homepage and navbar to more specific web pages like your “about” page or “contact” page.
SEM: Search Engine Marketing
Search Engine Marketing is the process of advertising through search engines, partly to ensure that anyone looking for your company can find it, but also to generate new leads to your website.
Social Network Marketing
Social networks are morphing into the main hubs of the internet. Social Network Marketing enables you to boost your presence on social networks so that you can get more visitors to your website.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is the process of sending mass or automated emails to potential clients, interested clients, and existing clients. Emailing your existing clients is often the first way you can boost your sales.

More information about the online world:

Blogging
Writing up and posting content on your website on a frequent basis.
A Blog
A component of a website that is usually oriented around new and time sensitive content. Often your blog will allow your customers or even just visitors to comment on the posts you make. A blog can attract more visitors to your website and enable you to engage efficiently with all your past customers.
Responsive Web Design
The process of designing your website so that your web pages automatically readjust to each of your visitors’ screen sizes. This is very important nowadays because so much of internet browsing is performed on cell phones and tablets. Also, search engines pay attention to this when they are deciding whether or not to put you in the top search results.
Wordpress
An extremely popular open source website platform.  Click here to learn much much more about it.
Wordpress Plugins
Bits of php files that hook in to the WordPress platform giving your WordPress site additional functionalities. They are nearly 40,000 plugins.
Woocommerce
An ecommerce platform for WordPress websites that facilitates almost any imaginable type of online store or transaction system. Woocommerce now powers over 30% of all online stores and is now owned by WordPress.
Woocommerce Extension, Add-on, or Plugin
Like a WordPress plugin, these bits of software extend the functionality of Woocommerce; enabling you to customize your online store or online transaction system. There are well over 1,000 Woocommerce extensions which means this ecommerce platform can be transformed into things as unique as a reservation and booking system, a taxi cab app, or an affiliate marketing network!
Content Management
The process of producing and updating content and making it accessible within your website.
CMS: Content Management System
A content management system is an online dashboard or user interface that enables you and your employees to update and monitor your website.
API Key
These are codes used to connect your website with other web apps so that your website can automatically and securely pass data to and from the app.
Web App
A web application is a website that serves a functional purpose (as a posed to a website which is used for marketing and providing information).
What does HTTP and HTTPS stand for?
Hyper Text Transfer Protocol – basically the language and etiquette of the world wide web (the internet). The “S” basically means with Security. Previously the S referred to a Security Socket Layer (SSL), which is now being replaced with Transfer Layer Security (TLS). Regardless of which cryptographic system is being used, the purpose of an HTTPS connections is to facilitate and execute private communication between your web browser (the client) and the website (the server.) SSL certificates used to be primarily for encryption of online payment transactions, however, they have become almost ubiquitous now, and are employed by almost every legitimate company. In 2011 Google announced that it takes SSL certificates into account when determining website pagerank. Therefore, SSL certificates are not only important for security, they are important for SEO.
Why is Data Analytics important?
Data analytics is the most unbiased way to validate whether your website is achieving its goal(s). If you invest any money or effort on an ongoing basis into your website and internet presence thru online advertising, content production, or social media networking, data analytics is needed to calculate the return on investment (ROI) of your endeavours.
What is a Webmaster Account?
A webmaster account is your portal to communicate with a search engine about their interpretation of your website. Thru this portal you can tell the search engine about your webpages, you can see if you have any broken links, and you can see how the search engine is summarizing your webpages in its search results. The search engine will also tell you ways to improve your website. (Usually we only bother with Google and Bing Webmaster Accounts.)
What is a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) and how does it apply to websites?
A product that is built quickly and cheaply so that you can test its viability in the marketplace. In terms of websites, a minimum viable product is often a one page website (or landing page) that is paired with cheap short term advertising to see whether the idea can draw people to the website and get them interested in signing up for more information, a free trial or even pre-ordering a product. The philosophy behind minimum viable products can be applied often. For example rather than write up a whole bunch of content for a webpage, just write a brief intro and put the intro on your homepage and see (using google analytics) whether people click to learn more, if so, then spend time to develop the content.
What is a Sitemap?
A sitemap is a webpage or file that lists all of your other webpages. The sitemaps that are submitted to search engines to notify them of your webpages are usually in xml format and contain other information describing the importance of certain webpages and  about how often those webpages are updated. A sitemap can also refer to a visual (html) list of your webpages, which can help your visitors and search engines click through to all your content.
What is a domain name?
A domain name is your website address. Its what appears in the top of your browser like chartdeck.com.
What is a subdomain?
An example of a subdomain is www.chartdeck.com, where “www” is the subdomain. Often you may see shop.yourdomain.com where “shop” is the subdomain. Subdomains are most often used for large websites with different web developers or for large websites that have many unique components, often designed for specific audiences.
How can I choose a domain name?
A good domain name is usually short and unambiguous. Now there are very few short .com domain names available. A longer domain name that has your business’s name in it and possibly your location or a target keyword will suffice. Its best to get a domain name with just the words, however if the domain name is unavailable and would requiring going to auction you should get the domain name with the words separated by a hyphen. You want your domain name to be unique enough that Google doesn’t autocorrect the spelling to a more prominent domain name.
How does my domain name connect with my hosting account so that I can visit my website?
Your domain name must be pointed towards your server (aka hosting account). In technical terms you must designate the domain names address record (A record) towards the IP address of the server.
What is an IP address?
An Internet Protocol Address is a sequence of 4 numbers separated by periods. An IP Address identifies the server hosting a website and it identifies your network connection so that your requests through the internet can be sent and received like mail. The beginning numbers in the IP address are related to your internet service provider (ISP) and the routers leading up to your home or the coffee shop you are at while the last few digits of your IP Address are assigned to your computer when you connect to the internet.
What is a TLD or top level domain name?
A TLD is your domain names suffix. Traditional the TLDs were .com, .org, .net, .edu, and .gov but now there are thousands. Search engines still seem to give the most credence to .com names.
What are DNS settings?
The domain name system settings are used to connect your website to your server (through an A record) and your @yourdomain.com email adress to your mail server (via mx records). These DNS settings can be edited through your domain name register or the permission to edit these settings can be passed on to your hosting company by pointing the DNS settings at their name servers.
What is a favicon?
Favicons are the small symbols that appear in the left hand side of each tab that is open in your browser window. It is important to have a distinctive favicon so that someone can easily find your tab in the event that they opened a link or visited another web page while browsing.
How do I keep my website secure and spam free?
 

Some hosting services offer a layer of protection however you can also have your web developer set you up with CloudFlare, which will help alot. They act as a barrier between your server and the visitors to your site. They maintain massive lists of hackers and spammers IP Addresses and will block them from even seeing your webpages. Akismet provides a specialized service like this for WordPress websites. These services will also protect your site from denial of services attacks (DOS) and decentralized DOS attacks where hackers repeatedly send requests to your server thereby clogging it up so that real people can visit your site.

Some things that will help secure your site:

  • Add security widgets to contact or comment forms.
  • If you have forms on your website, or basically any input boxes, parse the inputs to block certain commands (known as SQL injections).
  • Make your passwords tricky.  
  • Keep your website’s core platform and additional software widgets upto date.
  • Force secure connections with https using an SSL certificate.
  • Use obscure usernames rather than things like “admin”
  • Lock the login page.

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