| |
| |
|
Web Design Information |
|
|
|
Choosing the Right Web Designer
Creating your web site can be a tricky process. Choosing the best web design company for your site is extremely important. Unless you run a web-based business, you probably do not have web design experience within your company. Building your web site will take time and a little homework! To create a web site for your business, follow these 4 simple steps: Establish Your Goals Before you begin looking for company to help you design and build your web site, take the time to understand the goals of your web site. This will be extremely important to help set expectations with the web design company you choose. In order to set your web site goals, ask yourself the following questions:
Take the time to answer each of the above questions and if you have time, write the answers down on a sheet of paper. These are the same questions most web design companies will ask you before they begin to create your site. If you have these questions answered up front, you will have some criteria for choosing the right web design company. For example, if you are a real estate agent, and want to publish listings on your web site, you should seek a web design company that knows about the real estate business and has created web pages for other real estate agents. Determine Your Budget How much do you want to spend on your web site. Web sites can cost you anywhere from $100 to $100,000 depending upon what you want it to do. Know your spending constraints before you begin negotiating with design companies. Whatever you do, do not tell a web design company what your budget is!! Always get pricing based on your needs, not you budget. Pick a Web Design Company Your choice of a web design company is a very important step. Take your time to investigate all of your options. Here are some important items to consider. Design vs. Build Depending upon the scope of your web site, you may need to choose two different companies. Building a web site is a highly technical process. Designing a web site is a highly creative process. Many advertising firms specialize in web site design which does not necessarily require any web development skills whatsoever. The process of creating a web site is similar to the process of building a new home. Before you ask a construction company to start building, you first seek out an architect who creates a blueprint of your house taking into account what you want (number of stories, square footage, etc.). Creating a detailed blueprint before construction begins can help you accurately estimate the final price. Without the blueprint, you may end up paying a lot of money for a house that does not fit your needs. Creating a web site is exactly the same except most web site "builders" also claim to be "designers". The good news is that you can look at other sites a web design company has created (like looking at other homes that a home builder has made). Make sure you ask the web design company what their process is for designing a web site vs. building a web site. They should understand the difference between these two concepts. If they don't, they're probably builder that think they can also architect. Evaluate Experience Has the web design company created web sites similar to yours? Do they have relevant industry experience? As with any services company, choosing someone that has relevant experience. If you want to sell products through your web site and accept credit card payments, does the web design company you are considering have experience doing just that? Review the Portfolio A well established web design company will have a solid portfolio of web sites that they have created for other clients. Ask for links to other site the design company has created and review each one. Do you like what you see? Do the sites have a style that appeals to you? In addition to reviewing web sites, ask for customer references. Contact their clients and ask them about their experience with the web design company. Were they happy with the results? Did they get what they paid for? How much did they pay? Would they recommend them? How long did it take? What didn't they like about the company? How responsive was the company when they had questions? Compare Prices Pricing for creating a web site can vary. Typically, web design companies will charge one of three ways:
The most important step in pricing is to make sure the potential design company outline all of the prices associated with the work and puts it all in writing. Never enter into a deal unless all of the costs are well understood up front. Also make sure that you understand what "done" means. Try and structure the payments such that a significant portion of the fees (20%) are not due until you "accept" the final web site. Include the agreed-upon dates in your contract and provisions for what will happen if these dates are not met. Solicit bids from multiple web design companies and compare both the pricing models and the prices themselves. There are thousands of web designers across the country and they should all fight feverously for your business! Be picky! If a web design company dismisses any of your questions regarding their design process, pricing, or client references, take your business elsewhere! About The Author Andy Quick is co-founder of Findmyhosting.com (http://www.findmyhosting.com), a free web hosting directory offering businesses and consumers a hassle free way to find the right hosting plan for their needs. Feel free to contact Andy at andy@findmyhosting.com in case you have any questions or comments regarding this article.
MORE RESOURCES:
Google News |
 |
|
|
RELATED ARTICLES
Simple Lines and Shapes for Your Logo Design Geometric designs come in all shapes and sizes? and lines. You can create your logo design or customize your illustration by using simple lines and shapes to create your very own unique image. What Is Your Websites Most Wanted Response? You spend time and money promoting your website; but what do you want to achieve (apart from more page views)? Is it more sales of Blue Widgets? Is it more subscribers on your mailing list? To be exact, what is your site's Most Wanted Response?I ask this question because in the excitement of creating your very own website, it is easy to forget (or not even consider) the main purpose of your site! Alas, I talk from experience!In late 1999 I created Shop Tour UK (http://www.shoptour. Top Ten Absolutely Free Websites for Downloading Cool Fonts The following list of websites is the best compilation of sites on the web where you can download many different fonts totally free. Also, there are a variety of different types of fonts and styles you can download from the following sites so start searching today. Facts You Should Know About Web Site Design and Search Engine Optimization 1. Web site File Structure / File NamingMost search engines do not recognize beyond two directory levels. Teach Yourself CSS The Easy Way I taught myself HTML back in the mid-nineties and was proud of the fact that I was able to accomplish the design of fairly complex web pages with nothing more than a starter HTML book, an HTML reference book, and the knowledge I had stored in my head. But back in those days, we web designers had what looking back was a fairly limited amount of tools with which to work, and the quality (or lack thereof) of sites on the web was lackluster at best. Hiring The Right Webmaster The Questions You Should Be Asking ? The Answers You Should Be ReceivingWhen interviewing webmasters, don't let price be your deciding factor. Among webmasters there is a split between those who are skilled in the fine art of Search Engine Optimization (SEO), and those who are not. Free Website Templates - Top 10 Things You Need to Know When building your website you might not have a large budget to devote to website design or a designer, so the best option for you might simply be to use free website templates. However, consider the following benefits as well as drawbacks before you decide to take this route of website design. Quality Website Design At An Affordable Price I always have people asking me if I know of anybody who can build them a website which is affordable but also professional looking. They want the website to be search engine friendly, there is no point in having a website if no one can see it, and fully optimised. 7 Tips To Increase Sales With Your Ecommerce Web Site Ecommerce is just exploding right now on the Net. More and more people are doing their shopping online. How to Hire a Web Designer/Programmer for Your Website Hire a designer or a programmer for your website is a daunting for any business entrepreneur. Remember that you're the important part of a design process. Web Site Professionalism? What Is It? Your web site should be-visitor friendly to navigatesearch engine friendly for the crawlersAutomated with ecommerce and subscription forms.. No Matr How Goud The Infomation... Typos, misspellings, hideous grammar, exclamation overkill and run-on sentences all undermine a Web site's message. Your reader will have to work too hard, and you won't have that reader long. How To Design Your Web Site With CSS Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) allows you to create fast loading pages, increase your search engine rankings, and modify your whole site with one style sheet. So why don't more people use them? This is because they got so used to html design and are afraid or too lazy to upgrade their skills. Save Thousands of Dollars by Creating Your Own Web Site With the advent of the Internet a whole new vista of business has opened up. Many erstwhile opportunities otherwise not available to us, many markets which were previously inaccessible are accessible to us now. Web Design for Ecommerce Your website is your tool for showing the online community an image of your Drop Ship retail business. Whether or not your business succeeds depends heavily on your website. How Do You Make A Website? No, that's not the real question. The real question is "How in the Heck Do You Make a Website???"You do not have to buy software. How To Write An Effective FAQ Page Websites that have multiple pages usually have a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page. There are several good reasons why you should have one. How To Make It Easy For Your Web Designer To Build Your Website You have an idea for a website and you are now looking for somebody to build you the site. You want it to be a smooth ride, and want to have a good working relationship with your web designer. How To Set Up A Professional Website On Your Own Using Web Templates To create professional websites is not an easy task by any means. There are many things that you got to take into consideration like easy navigation, strategic links, clean coding, professional layout, easy downloading, scanability, usability and so on. Revising Your Site - What Happened To My Search Engine Placement? As of September, Smartads went through what so many have done before. I changed the entire site.
|
| home | site map |
| © 2007 |