The New Web Business Guide Introduction can be found here. Chapter 5 - Planning Your Website Navigation can be found here
Ok, first I have to admit that I am a little harsh on website designers and website design companies. The reason is that the content that goes into your website is a lot more important than the shell you put it into.
Many people pay thousands of dollars to a website design company, then they want cheap content to put into their website. Search engines will not rank you higher because your logo is prettier than your competitors logo. Search engines will not rank you higher because you picked better colors than your competitor did.
You do need a professional looking website for your users. It builds trust if the website does not look amateurish. So web design is important to a degree, but again, it’s the content that will get you ranked higher in the search engines. it’s the content that will actually convince people to buy from you. It’s the content that will get people to bookmark you, link to you, share your link with their friends, and visit you mkore often.
So I just want you to keep website design in perspective. Do not spend most of your budget on website design and leave very little for content and promoting your website.
The Design Your Website Quiz
A. I will be designing my own website.
B. I will be hiring someone I know to design my website
C. I will be hiring a company to design my website.
D. I will just buy a website template or get a free template and use that.
E. I will be installing a CMS system like Joomla.
F. I don’t know.
A. I will be designing my own website.
Automated Software for Web Design: If you plan to use dreamweaver, frontpage, composer, or some other software that automatically creates code for you, it’s a mistake. Converting word docs into html pages is even worse. If you chose A and planned to use automated website design software, you should rethink your choice in the website design quiz.
If you don’t, you will have to hire someone to fix the code and optimize your website for the search engines later. SEO should be done as the website is built, not as an afterthought. Doing so will save you a lot of money in the long run. Automated Web Design Software will not create optimized code and therefore it’s useless.
I know how to write html, php, javascript, AJAX, or other code manually. If this applies to you, then you are ready to design your own website as long as you also know something about search engine optimization.
Just being a good coder and designer is not enough to build a website that will be successful in the search engines. You can do a two-part process by designing your own website, then hiring someone to optimize it, but it is much better when the designer actually knows SEO as well.
So, it’s your decision. If you feel confident that you can build and design a website that is also optimized for the search engines, or you plan to hire an SEO expert afterwards, then go for it. We will be covering how to optimize your website in the new web business guide, so if you follow along with those instructions you are probably ready to go.
B. I will be hiring someone I know to design my website.
There are horror stories you should know before you hire your relative, employee, or a friend to design your website. This almost never works out well for your online business. Many people do it and they usually sacrifice any opportunity they have to actually make money online becaus ethey want to hire someone they know or someone they know needs the extra work.
If that someone you know really does know web design and SEO and they have a track record of doing so successfully, then go ahead. But you need to approach them the same way you would any web design company that you don’t know.
You still need a contract no matter who they are. Even if it’s your son or daughter, they need to sign a contract. They need to learn how business is done just like anyone else if they plan to run a web design business.
You need to know turnaround time and the costs upfront. They need to know what you expect from them upfront. It’s still a business deal even if you know them.
Keep in mind that you may end up having to hire someone else to finish or fix the project later. In many cases, since they know you will be understanding because you are a friend or relative, they will make your website less of a priority than other projects from strangers. They know the client that does not know them very well will not be understanding about missed deadlines and shoddy work. So why should you be?
And especially beware of the friend or relative that is going to give you a huge discount or offer to do it for free because they are in the web design business. Again, they will not make your website design project their top priority. Paying clients always come first. Pay them full price and expect them to treat you like a paying client and not like a relative or friend.
C. I will be hiring a company to design my website.
As I said in the beginning of this chapter on web design, you need to watch your budget. Content, advertising, and promoting your website through link building, social bookmarking, etc. will be next and those cost money as well.
Unless you are building an ecommerce website, a website that depends on a lot of databases, or one that is very technical in nature, you should not be spending a ton of money on website design.
Do not allow the web design company to convince you that you need a lot of extra technical features that you do not need. You do not have to have flash. You do not want dynamic webpages that are created from a database rather than static html pages unless your business plan, products, and services demand you do so. Only if there is no other way to do it.
The preferred method of building your webpages is to build them in html no matter what the designer tells you. HTML is much easier to optimize and much cheaper to design. HTML pages will out-perform dynamic pages in the search engines. It’s a fact.
Again, there are websites that do require extra technical work. Custom shopping carts are an example. If you have hundreds or thousands of products, you will need to use databases for those. You would need a database if you are going to be calling on a lot of images or if you are allowing people to upload stuff to your website.
These are not the only examples, but I just wanted you to know where you might need to spend extra money on building your website. But then you are spending the money on technicians and coding, not design. Do not let someone convince you that the design portion of the job should cost a lot of money.
For many online businesses, all the designer really needs to provide is a main page, a contact page (with a mail form script that is secure and that does not work just for users who have outlook or outlook express), and a page called content.html.
Three pages. That is all the designer needs to build for many websites. You will be inclined to order more pages because of the navigation, but you do not need the designer for this.
Example; You have a law firm. You planned your navigation to have the following pages in your website;
main page
contact page
about us page
privacy policy
terms of service
each lawyer gets their own page for a profile
a successful cases page
a blog
You have the designer build the main page, the contact us page, and content.html. Then you write the content you want into the content page and save it as about.html. Then you write content into content.html for your privacy page and save it as privacy.thml. You do the same for terms of service, each lawyer’s page, and your successful cases page.
Content.html already had the sidebar or top navigation menu or whatever. All you have to do is add a link in the menu for each page you build. Remember to add those links to your main page and contact page as well.
I don’t expect web designers to agree because they want to charge you for designing each page. But the only thing that changes in those extra pages is the content and what you save the file as and the links you add to the menu. They are not designing each page.
The bottom line is plan your budget wisely. You need to know that you will have monthly costs associated with promoting your website and search engine marketing. You need to remember that great original content is going to be at least as costly as design.
There is an old saying on the web about building websites. You build the first one for show and the rest for dough. You can make money online with a website that costs $500 to build just as easy as you can make money with a website that costs $10,000 to build.
In the next post we will go over the other choices like CMS and using templates.
» New Web Business Guide Chapter 6 - Website Design - SEO Service Provider
Website design will still play an important role in providing that professional look for your business. Make sure you create the proper and professional projection for your business.
[...] Chapter 6 - Website Design Part 1 can be found here [...]
If you want entice your online customers first of all you will have to give an attractive shape to your website. So defiantly website design plays an important role in any online business.We should more conscious on our web look.
There is an old saying about websites that I like. You build the first one for show and the rest for dough.
I think a website should look attractive to it’s target audience. For example, I provide content to website owners. They don’t really care what my website looks like. They care about content.
If I were selling graphics to people, then my site should have a lot of great looking graphics.
If I run a newspaper website, it needs to look like a news site. Content over design, but still a professional look.
So each type of website has different design needs and some do need to be more graphic-rich.
…
Many people pay thousands of dollars to a website design company, then they want cheap content to put into their website. Search engines will not rank you higher because your logo is prettier than your competitors logo. Search engines will not rank you…