Internet Gods and Goddesses

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It’s been several years since you had someone design your company web site and now it’s outdated. You are losing business to competitors that have quality designed web sites with great layout and navigation. This may be your first company web site and you want to make the most of your money and time.

How do you choose a quality web design company that will understand your companies’ objective for designing or redesigning this web site?

First, you need to answer a few questions.

1. What is your budget and time frame for completing the web design or redesign project?

2. Are you going to be using original content and pictures for building this web site?

3. If this is a website redesign, are you planning on getting updated images and content for this new look and layout or will you need the web design company to supply them for you?

4. Does any one at your company have basic editing skills and will they be able to update the website content or will this be an ongoing job for the web design company you hire?

5. Are you looking for a local web design company?

6. Do you already have an idea of your web design colors, layout, and navigation?

Knowing the answers to these questions, will help you when you locate the right web design company.

Now it’s time to find the right web design company for your needs. Go to Google and search for local web design firms and you will see how many results show. Take “web design orlando” for example: Results 8,860,000. Wow, there are a lot of results for “web design orlando”.

Don’t panic, you will probably find a company that can do the quality web design work you need in the first 50 results. Quality web design firms will have a portfolio of work online that will show an example of their custom web design work. Start at the first web design result on work your way down.

Examine the portfolio to see if there is anything equivalent to the web design layout you are imagining. You will be able to tell immediately if this web design firm is right for your company and its look and feel. Find out how long they have been in the web design industry and compare that to how many quality web sites they have designed in that time.

If this is a redesign, find out how many web site redesigns that have completed and ask to see the web site before and after the redesign.

Find out if they have the staff available to work on your entire web design needs and that they know the programming necessary to complete the job in a timely manner. Ask for references, a top end web design firm will be glad to offer up references on the web design work performed. Most web design references will be glad to talk to you about the quality job your potential web design company did on their web site.

Depending on your web design budget, it may help to several quality web design companies to talk to. You will want to get at least 3 estimates and it never hurts to have more.

Remember, when it comes to your business and your companies exposure on internet, take you time locating a quality web design company. Your future may depend on it.

Web designing has become the in thing today. There are hordes of web designers and web designing companies across the globe ready to flaunt their designing skills and innovations with latest techniques of designing. But all said and done web designing is not as easy and simple as it seems. There is much thought process to be done before the actual web designing commences. The following are the questions are to be considered before designing your web site:

What is the purpose of your business? What is the market situation for your product or service? What is the problem area that you need to address? What is your overall marketing strategy? What is your marketing plan? Who are your competitors and what is their strategy? What are your priority markets? Whom do you wish to target? What budget do you allocate to promotions and advertising? What would be the role of Internet advertising? What are the goals you wish to accomplish through your web site? Do you wish to have the web site just for the sake of having it? Or do you have a clear vision and purpose to have the web site? Do you take the web designing seriously?

Ideally one should have the clarity of thoughts and action on all the above areas to come to the decision of designing a web site. The web design should be such that it serves the basic purpose of your business and it appeals to your target audience wherever they are there across the globe. You need to know your target audience, and keep them in mind throughout the web development process. Say clearly what you want to convey, concisely and focused on what they want and plan to give them all the information they need.

Your web site content is the most powerful aspect of your website’s presentation — more than anything else. Creating effective text will bring you the response you expect from your visitors. If your website is well written, it’s guaranteed to be more successful than sites that rely on mediocre writing, no matter how amazing their graphics may look. It takes some work! Please note one thing — if you expect success, your text needs to be clear by each and every word!

Presentation Of web site: When you start to develop graphical concepts for your site, remember the benefits of simplicity. It’s easy to get carried away with web graphics, but having too many flashy visuals can be very distracting — and they can take ages for browsers to load. You are developing website to give information about your company not to show the designing skills of your web designers. Even limited use of images and graphics can create a wonderful site if used smartly.

Smooth Surfing: Avoid links that makes the visitor to leave your site. Make the links for only those pages that are very important for you to promote your business or visitor must know. Good web navigation helps people to orient themselves in your website and find what they’re looking for. Each page should also give your visitor easy access to all of the features of your site. There are many options for laying out your menus for the web site design but it’s vital to keep your navigation simple, clear and consistent throughout your site. The visitor should be very comfortable with your web site whether he reads or navigates through your site.

No page counters: Page counters do nothing except make you look like an amateur, mess with your design and tell competitors about your site you probably don’t want them to know! If you want to know how many people are visiting your site, just ask your web hosting company for the server stats.

Focus on result orientation: You are more concerned with the result, regardless of the technology used by your designer. Avoid using back ground music on web page as music file is pretty heavy and takes time to down load. You should focus more on content on web pages to generate inquires rather than entertaining visitor by placing undesired flash, music, marquee, animation etc.

Avoid using framesets in website: It is very easy to design frame based website for any web design company. This takes less time to design and does not require any type of extra designing skills but it will make site very complicated and at times cause listing problem with search engines. This shall also help your site to become search engine friendly site.

Maintain consistency in web pages structure throughout the website: do not take web site as your company or product brochure. Some designers recommend creating a different structure of their web pages within same web site. People always enjoy consistency of a stream of water continuously flowing with the same speed and flow! The same is the case with your web site visitor. Let him experience the same flow and design pattern of all your pages throughout the site. That’s why all successful and famous sites have the same look and feel.

Create site map page:
A site map is a simple web page with text links to all the websites sub-pages organized in proper categories; a lot of people will use a site map if they can find one. Site map is very useful to guide visitors to make them reach to the destination page. Site map for web site will also be helpful if you wish to optimize your web pages for the search engines.

Make your titles on your web page: One of the core attributes of a web page is its title. In between the tags you can specify the page’s title as it appears in the browsers top title bar and in the search engine results. Visitor pay attention to the TITLE of the web page when that page is listed in the search engines. This indeed is a very crucial and sensitive issue while you write the title for that web page. If it is not written improperly you might end up losing many visitors because they could not judge whether you site would be carrying the information they want!

Under construction pages: If your page is not ready do not put it up and promote. It is indeed a very irritating experience when the surfer gets to your site after searching from the search engine and gets frustrated on seeing a dead page or the instruction that your site is under process. Don’t lose your visitor even before he has seen your site! If you have links that are pointing to the pages which are not ready, disable them until your page is ready. Or you can link that page to the contact us page till pages are ready so that visitor may contact you for the information about that particular product or services in future when he needs them.

Color: Avoid using too many colors in your web site: Color is a way the visitor of the web site identifies things. Keep the color scheme of your web site limited to a couple of colors and keep it consistent across your site unless you want to demonstrate some colorful presentation. Reading a text with too many colors will create strain to the eyes and visitor will try to skip that text rater than reading thoroughly.

Do provide alternate text (using the ‘alt’ attribute of the image tag) for all important images of the website:
Alternate text is text that you insert in your image tags that is used by text only browsers. You should put meaningful information in the alternative text that will benefit those who can’t see and it will also help you with the search engine optimization process as search engine spider can not read images. It can only read text which is being incorporated in your web design.