Do you Understand your choices with web site design?

What choices do you have with web site design? Are there any you don’t already know about? These are the first two questions you have to answer for yourself. I will be trying to help you with them in order for you to be as informed as possible when making your choice about who to engage as a website design firm.

I’ll start out by saying that most of what I’ll be telling you, you can find out on the internet though various searches on major search engines. Other things that will be said are from my experiences from the last fourteen years as a web developer and graphic designer.

I know you will find at least one or two things you didn’t know about, or haven’t thought about as you begin your long journey of making a successful internet web site. Along the way I hope to entertain you, as well as educate you to the rich world of options and choices out available to you. I will also show you the dark side of the internet, that you may not be aware, and how it can effect your online business.

I know who I am….

One of the first things you need to know about when thinking of starting, or for that matter re-designing, your web site is the “look and feel”. How do you want to come across to your customers? Do you want the “large corporation” look or snazzy graphics that will blow your customers eyes out when they get to the site?

Should that even be the question? I do not believe it is. Your web site is not about you. Really! I’m not joking here. Read that last sentence again then go on to the next section.

Who am I working for?

At this point you may be wondering just what I mean by this statement. I know most of you are saying “What?! Of course it’s about my company! Why else would I have a web site to begin with, if it wasn’t about my company?”.

Well… Why did you start your company? Was it so you could say to your buddies “hey I have a company, look what I did!” or was it to help your customers get a service that you thought would help them? If it was the former, then by all means get that flashy web site! Get all the bells and whistles you can throw in to the pot. It fits you. If your choice was the later read on…

Monsters, Designs and Templates, oh my!

Since the technology to mass produce web pages has been made easier for the “common man” to start up his own web site, web sites and companies abound that produce templates for everyone to use.

They can be deceivingly cheap to acquire. I say “deceivingly cheap” because when you look at the surface of the product, it only costs a few dollars compared to a custom design (and you would look like the other 10,000 companies that bought that exact same design as well), or does it? If you wanted to make the template “unique” you have to pay upwards of $2,000.00 for some of them, and then they will not sell that template AGAIN (this doesn’t mean that they have not sold it before, of course). $2,000 and you’ll still need to populate the website with content by yourself…

Anyone got the time?

How much is your time worth to you? After you purchase that cheap template, you will have to find a web hosting company for it. How do you know which host to use? It takes some of that very precious time to find the right one.

After you find a host, now you have to learn about “FTP” programs, or maybe just learn how to transfer files on your new host. TIME lost AGAIN.

Now that everything has been uploaded to your hosting company’s server, you will need to learn how to put your content into the template. Some are not so hard to figure out, others are not that easy and require you to learn a new language like HTML, or XHTML, XML, PHP, ASP or the like in order for you to get the page content to look just right.

Don’t forget that CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) standards are fast becoming the De facto way of laying sites. With CSS you will have to learn not only the language, but figure out the cross browser compatibility problems inherent with the language. ALL THAT TIME *POOF!* How many hours now gone?

Oli Oli Oxen Free!

Considering all the time that you have now put into your web site… It’s now ready for the internet and making you money right away… Right? WELLLL… No. It isn’t… Now you have to think about Search Engine Optimization (SEO). I will discuss this topic in my next article where you will find out some of the things you need to think about in order to be seen in the major search engines and how to market your brand new web site!

If you have any related questions, are looking for a web design company that believes that educating the customer is just as important as “getting the Job done”, or you just need to know more about web sites and how to make them successful give us a call.

There are plenty of companies that will design a web site for you, but where else are you going to get an education in the process?

Author: Shannon Smith JH Studios