Selecting a Website Design Company - My top tips for ensuring a trouble-free web site design.
When it comes to selecting a website design company keep the following in mind and you just might get the WESITE YOU ALWAYS WANTED
1) What are your objectives? Do you want to sell directly from the web site
or do you wish to use your web site as an online brochure - producing leads
to sell in a more traditional way?
2) Determine a budget. You don’t need to spend thousands of pounds on your web
design - but clearly a budget of £5000 will create more than a budget of
£1000 or £500. Be realistic about what you are trying to achieve. Don’t
expect an all-singing, all-dancing site if your budget is limited.
3) Become familiar with the web. Spend some hours ’surfing’ the net and
‘bookmark’ sites you like the design of. Show these to your proposed
designer. I find a surprising number of business owners have commissioned
web sites when they themselves have little or no idea of the Web and how it
works. They have left this all to the web designers - often with disastrous
results. It’s no coincidence that these are the same people who often
mistakenly think that the Internet doesn’t work - just because their first
attempt did not prove successful.
4) Local or Global? If your strategy is more local than global then clearly
the Internet will work differently for you compared to organizations
operating nationally or internationally. Top search engine positioning will
not be such a great priority as most of your web visitors will come via
local more traditional advertising. However, please don’t make the mistake
of assuming a ‘lower quality’ site will do. Your visitors will still ‘judge’
you against all the sites they visit - so you still need an easy to use /
navigate web site with a professional feel.
5) Determine a deadline. Be realistic - if you want a site urgently make sure
designers you speak to understand this. Also be prepared to work with the
designers and provide feedback / approvals as quickly as possible. I have had
websites up and running within the week - however 3 - 4 weeks is a
more realistic time scale.
6 ) Search Engines. Ask your web designers for evidence of their success in
placing sites they have previously designed high in the search engines. Web
design and web marketing / search engine promotion are quite different
skills. Ideally they should be carried out by separate people /
organizations. (working together) A lot of web designers do not even know
how to design a site that both looks good and is search engine friendly. If
they can’t show you proof or fill you with confidence on this issue - don’t
use them. Also their ‘proof’ should be from one of the major search engines
/ directories (Yahoo, MSN, Google) - not one of the many smaller engines
that now exist but which few people actually visit!
7) Graphics Avoid the extensive use of graphics on your site - they take
longer to download and spoil the viewing pleasure of your visitors who are
likely to ‘click away’ if the page takes too long to load. Better to have smaller images, which load quickly, along with
interesting well-written text that catches the visitor’s interest. The
smaller images can be ‘thumbnails’ which visitors can click in order to view
a larger image if they require. It’s also worth remembering that it’s mainly
the text within the ‘body copy’ of the web page that search engines ‘read’
(index). If your home page, in particular, consists of one or two large
graphics and very little text it’s unlikely to rank high in search engines.
8) Plug-ins Special software or ‘plug-ins’ that needs to be downloaded in
order to view a site should be avoided. They tend not to be search engine
friendly and will often take quite a while to download. (My only acception to this may be: Macromedia Flash 8 Player - which is increasingly useful for viewing video content)
9) Frames Please make sure your web designer avoids using ‘frames’ to design
your site. Frames are a method of displaying two or more separate web pages
on your browser screen at the same time. I will not go into a detailed
explanation here of why you should avoid them - suffice to say that any
designer ‘worth his or her salt’ should know they are not particularly
search engine friendly. If they don’t know this, avoid them.
10) DIY Of course you can design your own web site. Simple software to do this
is readily available to download on the internet and is often given free
with computer magazines. However, unless you become a very proficient user
(which takes time) your sites will tend to look ‘amateurish’. In my opinion
it is much better to use a professional. The DIY programmes are often just
‘too simple’ (a bit like desktop publishing) and will not give you the
editing features necessary to create a search engine friendly web site. Also
beware of the many so-called “friends of friends ” who have suddenly become
web experts and claim to design sites. They could be using this free simple
software. Ask them the same questions that you would ask any web designer
and in particular ‘what about the search engine successes?’.
11) Final approval Before ‘approving’ any final web design insist on viewing
that design online. Often designers will present their ideas on a laptop -
where the proposed web design is stored on the hard drive. That’s fine - but
be aware the hard drive will deliver the images much faster than the
Internet. You don’t want to find that this design you like on the laptop
‘takes all day’ to download when it’s on your web site.
12) My final tip So often we find that the design of the company web site is
‘relegated’ to the IT department. While I wouldn’t suggest that the IT
department shouldn’t have an input, - I would point out that this is
primarily a marketing issue. After all, you would rarely consult the IT
department over the design of a new brochure. When you start getting those
web enquiries you need to make sure they are responded to as quickly as
possible. You should at the very least respond with an email
acknowledgement. In our experience those in sales / marketing are best
placed to do that.
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