May
15
The cost of website design nowadays has dramatically decreased as the number of businesses now offering this service has increased. This has made marketing your online presence all the more affordable thanks the huge increase in competition. Since 2005 Website By Design has been generously discounting the cost of custom website design projects, to actively increase competition in the market and to offer an affordable solution to all businesses and charities.
We have even gone to the extent of creating a quarterly competition to create a free custom website design to any small business.
If you are just starting out on the road to creating your first project then you will be wondering where to start. There are not many places on the net that can offer you a step by step guide to creating an online presence, we will.
Before you can even start down that road there are still a number of things to consider. Sooner or later you are going to have to decide whether you are going to create the pages yourself or you are going to hire a dedicated designer to compile the pages for you.
If you have a good knowledge of basic HTML then you will want to do the lot yourself using any authoring tool from Notepad to Contribute or Dreamweaver, but if time constraints are against you then it`s time to consider a specialist to bring it all together for you.
Your Cousins Nephew who has pulled a page together on MySpace does not count towards the meaning of the word “specialist”. A Custom Website Designer is a dedicated design business or freelancer who has the experience, knowledge and dedication to what they do and that more often than not is designing aesthetically beautiful and semantically valid digital works of art.
Choosing the right designer is solely your responsibility, unless you have the luxury of delegating that important decision to another member of your growing empire, so choices and comparisons now come into play.
Who will i choose?
Choosing a shortlist of designers to consider for your project is simply answered by;
- Cost
- Communication
- Adaptability
Cost is obviously a huge factor when considering your website designer, you need to contact all of those designers on a shortlist that you have compiled and ask them for a quote for your project, an initial quote will be given using all of the information you supply during any communication.
Communication is absotutely vital at all stages from the initial contact right up to and including a quarterly or annual review of the performance of your website, this after sales method is tried and trusted within thousands of business models so why should website design be any different?
Adaptability is the changing face of your design from the original concept right up to and including any redesign, we have a saying in Sunderland that goes “Shy bairns get nowt” so why not ask for as much as you can when you are discussing what you want to have included in your design, it could be the ability for something as simple as a newsletter or even for setting up interactive live online chat, whatever you want your website to do every good custom website designer should be capable of delivering.
How do I compare?
Comparing designers that are going to offer cost effective solutions to your needs is not going to be easy.
- What is the immediate impression you received when you first arrived at their website?
- Is the language techno jargon, informative or easy to understand?
- Are there easy to follow links to get in touch or another call to action?
If you have any doubts to any of those questions then are you really going to consider getting in touch?
So now you have chosen your designer who has offered to manage your project at a cost that is right, the next step is setting up your domain name and hosting.
Choosing the Domain Name
Choosing a domain name is a vital step in the very early stages of Search Engine Optimisation (a ranking factor along with a few others of how results are displayed within Search Engine Result Pages (SERP`s))
A host is basically a service provider that offers a place to store your websites files at a monthly cost the domain name can be registered to you or your business for 2 years and sometimes up to ten years, the choice is yours.A lot of hosting providers will provide both of these together and cost less than a night out to maintain on a 6 monthly period. Once you have set these up your designer will require the login details and passwords so that they can transfer all of your project files by FTP (File Transfer Protocol) to your hosts Server.
Now you have a basic understanding of setting up your first website using a custom website designer or freelancer, the next step is to consider who you are going to choose, good luck.