Website Design
Many Approaches, Many Solutions, Many Designs
You can design your website yourself but there are a number of important, and often forgotten, elements of a good website that will set you apart. Do you know what they are? Are you able to code what you need? Would your time be better spent developing other aspects of your business? After all, what is your business? Are you really a web designer? Good design is important and it is not always about choosing colors and selecting pictures.
Website designers are a strange lot. There is no single personality, attitude, or intelect, that defines web designer. They are all different. As different as any people are from each other. Each approaching in his or her own way but there are some constants. To produce an effective website the designer will need to know a few things. Typically these things are found as the answers to these questions:
1. What is your business all about?
2. What is your target market?
3. Do you have an existing logo to include in the design?
4. What do you expect the website to accomplish for your business?
5. What is your budget for the project?
6. What is the deadline for completion?
7. How many pages will be required?
8. How will they be grouped?
9. Will you need forms to gather information?
10. Do you need a shopping cart system?
11. Do you have a PayPal, Google, or merchant account?
12. What is it that you want visitors to your site to understand?
13. What five sites do you see as your primary competition?
14. What, if anything, do you especially like about those sites?
16. What five sites, not your competion, do you also like?
17. What do you like about those sites?
18. Of those ten sites what do you NOT like?
19. Do you require site management or will you handle this?
20. Do you have your own domain name and/or hosting?
As designers we create both hand coded completely original custom sites. These are expensive. We also offer semi-custom and content management or shopping cart sites. These are considerably more affordable for most. We really like the WordPress website system. It is quicker to set up and configure and whether you want to use one of the hundreds of available themes, have a semi-custom theme design (like this site), or have a fully customized site, WordPress can support your needs.
We strongly recommend you do not use Flash (animation) or splash introduction pages. You have a very limited time to catch your visitor’s attention — some say an average of 3 to 5 seconds — and splash pages slow down access to your site to the point many people will just leave. They are less than beneficial for SEO as well.
A well designed site loads fast and delivers your message, your call to action, to your visitors. There are many different ways to approach this but the results should all be the same; a quality, professional, website that defines your business identity.
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