• Explain that the site will obviously take much longer to launch without content. then there’s the time it takes for search engines to index the site – the sooner it’s live, the sooner people will be able to find it, the sooner their new business will roll in!
• Offer to get the content written for them – supply a document that outlines what basic information should be provided for each page so that you can outsource the work to a copy-writer. Obviously this will incur higher charges, but the client might be amenable to it if content is a real issue.
• Provide the tools for the client to enter content directly into the site at their own pace. It should be possible to create the site’s entire layout with all pages in place, just with placeholder text that the client can replace. This way, you could close up the project and allow the client to populate their site themselves.

Most of us haven’t ever had to do this in our lives. So where do you start and why choose X designer over Y? Here are my suggestions…

Choose someone local

These days you can hire any web designer from just about anywhere on the planet. But nothing beats being able to talk to someone face to face. To be able to share ideas, look at example websites and designs together and most importantly: form a relationship. It’s difficult to form a relationship with someone who lives in Skegness when you’re living in London.

Choosing someone local also means you’re feeding your local economy.  Plus, someone reasonably local is in your time zone, your currency and will most likely be available to you to a greater degree than someone further away. This means you project could take less time to complete.

Cheaper isn’t always better

Anyone can knock up a web page these days and there are plenty of people doing it. The industry has become saturated with people with poor to mediocre web design skills, and it seems like anyone is willing to have a go.  The old adage “if it seems to good to be true…” springs to mind.

Try to avoid the temptation to get ‘your mate’ to do your site. You will almost certainly regret it unless they are a professional. There will be poor design, poor attention to detail, and because you’re a mate, probably not a lot of motivation to stay on track and complete. No-one wants to ruin a friendship over a poorly done website.

These days you get what you pay for. There are ways of getting cheap websites that are of a higher design quality – they’re called templates. That means that they’re widely available to the public and your site will not be unique. If your business needs unique branding, stay away! Also remember that a web template still needs to be edited with your content and put together by someone that knows what they’re doing, so downloading a web template is only the start of your project in this scenario.

It’s also worth remembering that there are prices for all kinds of levels of site from a few hundred to thousands.  A decent brochure site for a small to medium business should cost in the region of £500 to £2000. As always, get various quotes from say 3 companies, but don’t just choose your web designer based on price, weigh up the price against their approach and chiefly the value for money and your requirements.

Studio vs Freelancer

A studio will have a whole team with various different expertise that will come together to create your site. You’ll have a main project manager who will be your contact and they will manage a team of designers, developers, testers, SEO people and admin and accounts staff to get your project off the ground. Studio’s need to charge more to cover their costs, so are generally much more expensive, but can invariably create something pretty great in a short space of time – unless of course they have taken on too much work. You’ll have to have a pretty great project manager that can manage the team and be fully up to date at all times with the project to ensure things go smoothly.

A freelance designer is the company, so they know everything about your project and will most likely be performing all aspects of the work themselves. This definitely keeps costs down and ensures good communication. It’s the far cheaper option, from which you can get results that are every bit as good as a studio’s.  Bear in mind that if you choose a freelancer they will need to be proficient in multiple disciplines. It’s all very well being able to design an amazing site in Photoshop, but coding it is another thing altogether, and search engine optimisation yet another.  Freelancers can also suffer from taking on too much work, so make sure you check out their availability and agree deadlines and milestones for deliverables.

Final Tips

• Do some browsing online and find sites you like the look of so that you have a design style in mind so that you can convey what you want more easily and so you can check it against potential designers’ portfolios to see if they can do that kind of thing.
• Look for designers in your area – it makes for a much better experience when you can meet them face to face. You’re establishing a relationship, so it makes sense to have them local.
• Get several quotes to make sure you’re not being ripped off
• Don’t just check price – check value for money and the features that your site will have
• Think about how you will maintain your site afterwards – does the designer offer a Content Management System so you won’t need to keep paying them to update things?
• Freelancers are usually cheaper than studios and can provide the same sort of results if they’re good!

Do yourself and everyone else a favour -

DON’T get your site done by your mate down the road who has done at least one website in his spare time and is quite happy to bash out yours for a discount.

Why Good Design Pays

If your content is excellent but no-one can find it, it might as well not be there.

If your site looks like it was built by your little sister for a school project, people will turn up on your site and then promptly leave.

Design is more than just making things pretty. It involves usability, psychology and trust. Good designers are like a musical arranger – they take multiple components and marry them together.

Here are just a few of the things a good designer will take into consideration whilst building your site:

• Primary and secondary and possibly even tertiary navigation to ensure that people can easily find the information they’re after
• Your site map – the pages of your site and how they will be structured.
• The layout of your homepage – to ensure that all the most interesting and eye catching content is presented well to lead visitors further into the site
• The layout of your content pages – to ensure content is spaced nicely to ensure readability
• Typography – your typefaces and their styles and sizes. Typography choices strongly affect readability as well as general aesthetics.
• Colour – colours have strong associative qualities and therefore strong psychological influences.
• Search engine optimisation – the way titles and headings are used and the way in which the site is built strongly affect the ability of search engines to read and index your site
• Use of images – images are powerful. Incorporating images that say the right thing is crucial to the message you’re putting out.

We humans are highly visual creatures. Just taking notice of adverts on TV or in magazines and billboards reveals so much about us – our desires and needs. We’re highly susceptible to associations between images and brands. You may think that adverts don’t affect you, but think about that next time you’re putting a particular brand of washing powder into your trolley instead of another one – something has led you to trust that brand over others.

There’s not a lot of difference between the ads you see on TV and the look and feel of your website.  People will trust you more if you have a professional looking website. Somehow it says “I’m successfull and my brand can afford this level of promotion.”  It says that you care about what you’re doing and you’ve invested in something because you’re serious about it. People with “kid-sister” websites don’t present that kind of image.

If you’re looking for a strong contemporary image built on a bed of cutting-edge technology for your business, Dacoda Multimedia can help.  I build beautiful websites married to excellent technical frameworks that empower.  Check out my portfolio here or make an enquiry to see how I could help.

Wikipedia has this description:

A blog (a contraction of the term “web log“)^[1] is a type of website, usually maintained by an individual with regular entries of commentary, descriptions of events, or other material such as graphics or video. Entries are commonly displayed in reverse-chronological order. “Blog” can also be used as a verb, meaning to maintain or add content to a blog.

Many blogs provide commentary or news on a particular subject; others function as more personal online diaries. A typical blog combines text, images, and links to other blogs, Web pages, and other media related to its topic. The ability of readers to leave comments in an interactive format is an important part of many blogs. Most blogs are primarily textual, although some focus on art (Art blog), photographs (photoblog), videos (Video blogging), music (MP3 blog), and audio (podcasting). Microblogging is another type of blogging, featuring very short posts.

What are the benefits of adding a blog to a website?

Blogging provides a means of creating useful content that is added frequently which promotes more visits to your site. A frequently maintained website or blog lets users know that you are active and current – that you haven’t just created your site 2 years ago and left it running with out of date material. A frequently updated website or blog promotes trust.

Blogging frequently can also create a community around your site. If you have useful information that you can share with the world, there are some people somewhere that will want to read it.  The fact that blogging encourages interaction through comments, means that you can actively engage with your audience and build relationships.  From a business point of view, this makes great sense.

One of the main differences between a regular website and a blog is this very nature of changing content. A website’s content will likely stay quite static and unchanging as it provides essential information about products or services that probably don’t change that much. However, if you are a specialist in your area, chances are you have a lot of knowledge that will be useful to people. A blog offers the opportunity for people to come back time and again, subscribe to email posts or RSS feeds of your posts and be kept up to date.

People who come to your site to read your blog for the information it provides may be persuaded to buy your products and services.

What to consider when planning the integration of a blog

Before you start a blog of your own, it’s useful to consider a number of things:

• What will you talk about? Is your business’s area of expertise narrow or wide?
• How much material will your chosen topics provide you with? Many bloggers run out of things to say after a while. Choosing your topics carefully can influence the longevity and effectiveness of your blog
• How frequently will you post? Do you have time constraints that might make blogging difficult or even impossible?
• If you’re not able to post regularly yourself, you could always look at delegating the responsibility to a member or members of your team to share the load.  If different members of your business have different specialties and skills, you could cover a range of related topics by different authors.
• Will you be able to moderate comments and provide feedback to your site visitors? Can you delegate this task, or will you disable commenting and interaction?
• Who are your target audience? What kind of tone will you employ in your writing?
• What do you want your blog to achieve? Closer customer relations, more site traffic, more sales, income from advertising?
• If you want to implement Google AdSense advertisements on your site, be aware that competitors ads may get shown.