About

Story Tappy is a small web design and hosting venture that caters to other small-scale creators and businesses. Clients can design their own site from scratch, from templates or have us design some or all of the site at a competitive rate.  

Story Tappy is best suited to:

• those who want unique design tools – such as the ability to add animations, horizontal scroll, content-toggle, and magic scroll (amongst other things). We also offer about 900 templates to choose from, and can assist with pre-made animations. Benefit from our economies-of-scale when it comes to premium licenses.
• those who want ongoing host costs to be lower than the likes of Wix, Squarespace and WordPress.com (especially if selling online).
• those who want to learn how to use WordPress (the world’s most popular web design interface by far) without having to do all the gruntwork – time and money – to get things configured and secure. 
• those who want the ability to tap into a personalised (human) design service as necessary. We can assist with animations, interactive section designs, logos and more. Involve us as little or as much as you need. Our extra services are quoted upfront and separate from our hosting fee.

Reasons Story Tappy may not suit you:

We want to be upfront about our limitations so there are no surprises. Story Tappy can offer sites at such a competitive rate because it does not offer certain things such as membership capability and extensive (unnecessary) storage. For more on what is and isn’t included, please see that section below.

Prices are listed on the pricing page. There is a one-time installation fee, and an upfront monthly hosting fee. There is no lock-in contract so you can cancel your subscription anytime. The hosting fee allows us to take care of security and general site maintenance. The installation fee allows us to partly customise your site so that you can hit the ground running. It includes:

• creating your nominated pages (but not the content on those pages).
• specifying which pages are to be the blog page (optional) and home page.
• linking your domain (if you have one) or assisting you to purchase one if necessary.
• adding your site title, description and favicon (small image that appears at the top of the web browser tab). We can resize that favicon image to a suitable size if you provide it to us.
• creating a menu structure (that you can modify or delete).
• installing your template of choice, if you’d like to use one. You can always override its styles later.

If further design assistance is required, Story Tappy can quote on the following:

• creating a specific web section or page.
• preparing images, be they photo or vector-based.
• preparing basic Lottie animations.
• editing short videos.
• writing copy or just generally designing the structure of your web content (which page for what content).
• logo design.
• website design from concept to completion.

Our websites cannot function independently of our web-hosting service.

The hosting price is subject to change with 2 months’ written notice. While we cannot control general inflation, rest assured that we view our market niche as ‘affordable’, so we never want to cost as much as Squarespace or Wix.

Absolutely, you can make changes to your own site. We are continuously adding to our resources section to help you on your design journey. There are also many online tutorials for how to use our plugins. Specifically, we use the WordPress CMS with the Elementor page builder, and have premium versions of Astra Pro, Premium Addons Elementor (PAE) and Ultimate Addons for Elementor (UAE).

Regarding uploads, as a general rule of thumb, each uploaded image should be 250Kb or less. If an image needs to be resized before uploading, this can be done via free programs such as FastStone Photo Resizer.

Keep in mind that the bigger the image file size, the slower the website will be to load, and this in turn will affect your website’s search engine ranking.

There are certain things that cannot be added to your website, as per our Terms of Service:

• Nudity and adult content
• Defamatory content
• Illegal content.

Yes, you can sell things on your website. However, Story Tappy’s niche is not focused on eCommerce, so we do not offer shopping carts. While it is possible (and we do host a small number of sites using WooCommerce), there are significant extra costs involved. If you are looking to create a dedicated online shop with multiple products, complex shipping, marketing and customer analytics, we recommend a platform like Shopify.

That said, if you simply want to sell limited products without fancy carts and check-outs, you could save a lot in ongoing host fees by using one of the methods below: 

• Open a free Stripe account and create a product there. Use Stripe to invoice the customer directly, as well as to manage all customer details. You can link to the customer login for your store with the URL provided by Stripe. This is Story Tappy’s link, for example.
• Open a free Paypal business account, create a button for a specific amount, then copy and paste the button into your WordPress page via the shortcode widget.
• Embed a Google Form with the free Payable Forms addon to connect it to your Stripe or Paypal account. A Google form has the added benefit of aggregating all data input into a shareable Google spreadsheet. This video and this video describe steps to take payment via Google Forms. It’s worth noting that in our experience, customer and subscription information do not get carried across nicely to Stripe. You may still want to explore this option for one-off payments if you do not need granular oversight over customers and subscriptions.
•  If you wish to sell tickets to an event, you could use a platform like Eventbrite or Try Booking. You can either link to that platform on your website or paste a shortcode from the platform onto your website (if one is available). ‘Linking out’ means viewers leave your site to complete a transaction. ‘Embedding’ (via shortcode) means viewers stay on your page to complete the process, even though all the data is handled through the 3rd party, not via our web servers.

Please keep in mind that our web hosting service is not intended for high volume transactions, as would be expected on a successful eCommerce site. In such cases, the site could expect to operate more slowly than a dedicated eCommerce platform like Shopify. Furthermore, if a website on our server is consuming more than its fair share of resources, we reserve the right to cancel that website’s subscription, as per our Terms of Service. 

Also as per our Terms, Story Tappy is not liable for any losses or damages incurred by you via your website, including those of a commercial nature.

Story Tappy can offer sites at such a competitive rate only because it does not offer certain things. It’s important to know from the outset what StoryTappy does and doesn’t provide, so you can weigh up your options before joining.

Included:

• Premium design tools.
• Security.
• Maintenance/updates.
• Caching (short-term memory in layman terms)
• 500Mb storage (ample for 99.9% of sites)
• SSL certificate.
• Content delivery network (CDN)
• Initial set up of site, including template, pages and menu structure.
• 2 x pre-made Lottie Animations (not customised)
• Almost 900 design templates (by Astra Pro and Premium Addons Elementor).
• Analytic capability (via your Site Kit account, for you to configure).

Not included:

• Membership capability.
• Shopping cart.
• Email hosting. You may be able to create a customised email via your domain host (e.g. hello@mydomain.com.au) or otherwise use a free email service like gmail (e.g. mydomain@gmail.com).
• Marketing. If you wish to integrate your website with an email marketing platform such as Mailchimp, you can simply paste a shortcode from Mailchimp (or other platform) onto your website. Mailchimp and others usually have free plans, as well as premium.
• Form builder. Spam bots are a huge nuisance and the way around them is to pay for expensive plugins (code). We prefer to keep your costs down and suggest instead that you embed a Google Form on your site, instead of trying to build one within your site. We strongly suggest you do not use a Contact Form built directly but use an embedded Google Form instead, which has the added benefit of neatly aggregating all form data. For marketing-specific forms, you can also embed forms by the likes of Mailchimp. Both Google Forms and Mailchimp offer free plans.
• Calendar and events widget. If you wish to display a calendar with events for sale, you can use a shortcode from a third party platform like Eventbrite. Some of these platforms offer free, as well as premium, plans.
• Logo design. If you don’t already have a logo, Story Tappy can quote to create one. Logos take considerable time and liaison. They are not included in our set up fee.
• Content creation. Unless otherwise agreed, our set up service only creates the site structure for you to add content to. We do not write copy as part of that service but we can quote.
• Custom domain purchase. Most domains are relatively cheap (approximately $20 per year). By default, your Story Tappy site would have a free subdomain address like this: https://yourbrand.storytappy.com. If you would like to use a custom domain instead, we can show you how to purchase one online and we would then map it to your website.
• Limitless storage. Websites shouldn’t have too many large files on them because they dramatically slow down the speed of the site. The average website is 40Mb, with the average page being about 2.5Mb, as you can read here. Storage at Story Tappy is 500Mb, with individual file uploads limited to 220kb. If limitless storage is important to you, we suggest you check out Squarespace or Shopify, but be prepared to pay more in ongoing fees. 
• Limitless bandwidth. If you suddenly have millions of people from all over the world visiting your site everyday, that would swamp our server, even with our content delivery network. If yours is a regular site, this will obviously not be an issue. If it is though, we may need to part ways, as per our Terms of Service. Naturally we would discuss the situation with you in advance and provide advice on how to transfer your site if necessary.
• Technical support for design niggles. Story Tappy is a small, ’boutique’ venture. We offer a low-cost product with low overheads so we cannot offer free 24/7 ticket-style support. If you seek help with a specific design feature, we can provide a reasonable quote or point you in the direction of online resources, of which there are many.
• Support for third-party integrations, such as to Paypal, MailChimp, Events Calendar, Instagram and Facebook. Third party integrations are routine and expected on WordPress sites but we do not set that up unless quoted separately. There are many online resources relevant to setting up each scenario. Note: social media platforms generally aren’t keen on directing viewers away from their sites/apps. Although these platforms say that they will integrate with WordPress, it is an arduous affair with hurdles sometimes coming from the social media side.
• The ability for public comments on your site. All comments are disabled so that there is no risk of spam-bots and malicious content being displayed. This is for your convenience as much as ours.