How To Choose a Web Designer

The web design industry is experiencing a growth rate of huge proportions, due partly to the numerous companies that have appeared as a result of continued Internet expansion. The business world’s appetite for websites and ecommerce solutions show no signs of abating in the near future, and organisations and individuals who want to commission the services of a web design company are faced with a dizzying choice of options.

Companies will rightly advertise their creative skills, technical expertise and design know-how. They will use lots of technical terms and buzzwords in their marketing literature, but because of the sheer number of companies all offering more or less the same services, the point is reached where all the advertising can begin to look almost identical.

How then does one go about choosing a competent design company from the many available? If you are new to the workings of the Internet, then the most obvious and perhaps safest method is via personal recommendation, which by its very nature is a vote of confidence from a satisfied customer and presents a golden opportunity for an organisation to excel itself; after all, there is nothing like a referral to start the ego twitching and make a company go all out to impress.

An alternative method to a referral is of course to look on the Internet itself. You will find literally thousands of web designers advertising their services and at the same time providing visual proof of their abilities via their own websites. It is always a good idea to look at portfolio and testimonial pages; you can then contact one or two of their customers to get verbal references; these may help you in deciding which design company is best for you.

Another option is to choose a company at random and talk to them about what you expect from your intended website. Good designers will listen to what you have to say and work with you; they will gather as much information as possible from a customer before going anywhere near a computer. Moreover, they will always be willing to offer sound advice and will develop solutions to help bring your ideas to life.

In addition, and perhaps the smallest sector of the web design industry are the self-taught individuals who whilst having no formal training or qualifications, do possess a natural talent, aptitude and enthusiasm for web design, and who for the most part produce extremely high-quality work often at a fraction of the cost charged by the larger companies.

It is worth mentioning that there are so many capable and talented designers available, that the hardest part of getting your website built will probably be deciding which company or individual you want to do it. Taking the time to look into all the options should help to ensure that whomever you chose will produce the required result.

Web Pages That Sucks

Don’t know where to start on the design of your web site? Well here is an idea, Web Pages that Suck. This site intends to give some advice on design issues by highlighting the bad and ugly and lack of usability around the web. It has also an interesting questionnaire where you can see if your web site sucks – interesting especially if you have not designed the site yourself. This site is worth a browse for ten minutes at least, it might just give you some insight.

Free Web Software

nvu
There are a few good programs for creating your own web site if you do not know HTML very well. FrontPage and Dreamweaver are the two most used. However they are not cheap, I doubt the value of them, especially FrontPage, for beginners or for client to use to update their own site.

There is a great FREE page creation software available from Nvu you can download it from this link.

If you are just starting out building your own website or need an easy cheap way to update things like addresses or telephone numbers this is the way to go.

Nvu is open source great also for developers who want to tweak the code. The program can be used on Windows, Mac, or Linux – so no messing with operating systems. The program is a WYSIWYG – makes layout easy for beginners.

* WYSIWYG editing of pages, making web creation as easy as typing a letter with your word processor.
* Integrated file management via FTP. Simply login to your web site and navigate through your files, editing web pages on the fly, directly from your site.
* Reliable HTML code creation that will work with all of today’s most popular browsers.
* Jump between WYSIWYG Editing Mode and HTML using tabs.
* Tabbed editing to make working on multiple pages a snap.
* Powerful support for forms, tables, and templates.
* The easiest-to-use, most powerful Web Authoring System available for Desktop Linux, Microsoft Windows and Apple Macintosh users.

This is the highlights from their front page – have a look well worth it for beginners or those just wanting free web creation software.

Web Hosting

Web hosting is an area where too many mistakes can be made at the start. Most web hosting companies are fine. I haven’t yet come across a web hosting company that is better than fine. The reason for this is economies of scale. I have not found or used any company that would be small enough to give personal attention, however I would not feel safe dealing with a company of that size in this market. I like the idea that my web hosting company is large and strong and not going to give me a problems by folding and disappearing – that would be too much trouble. I always have current copies of all sites, but there are domain names to consider.

For a small business site web hosting should cost no more than €50 or €60, often less.

Don’t expect them to hand hold you setting up FTP or email.

If you site is country specific, it is a good idea to have the hosting in that country – for optimisation reasons.

Make sure they offer PHP and MySQL databases for FREE. This is average and although you may not need either at the beginning chances are you will if you ever do business through your site or if you need a company blog at any time in the future.

If you know little about hosting take advice – your web designer or your SEO marketer will know the answers, and keep in mind the above when talking to them.

Keywords

Keywords are still important – like Fruit Smoothie Recipes. Firstly know what your customer will search for, are they finding you under Smoothie Recipes or Fruit Recipes or some other variation.

Use the keywords in the page title. This is a must, at present search engines, especially Google, rate this highly. And strangely enough it is the title tag that most people when viewing a site don’t notice. But it is the title that will be used when you site appears in the search engine results page. Make your potential customer want to click that title and visit your web site, be relevant.

Many companies when starting out want the name of their company as the title and the H1 tag. Don’t be temped by this pull to your ego – rather than the pull to your profits. Few people are going to find you under your company name unless you are already a well known brand.

The next on the list for keywords is the H1 tag. This is the title on the page, and again it should contain the search term that you want to be found under.
So you may ask where will my Company name be seen? The answer is simple. If you have a good designer they will have it as part of the header on the page – and not as a graphic – search engines don’t read graphics.