11 QUESTIONS ABOUT WEB DESIGN

1) Website design isn't rocket science! Do I NEED a designer to create my web Site?

If you were a professional racecar driver, would you have just anybody design and build you your Formula-One Race car? Probably not.

Instead, you should have a professional designer build your site to reflect your company's mission... help you sell your products.... or just to get your name orbiting around the world. A website can perform many tasks.. it's up to you to decide what you want it to do for you, and up to your developer to accomplish that task.

2) What is the first step in having a site designed?

Obtaining a domain name is the first step. To obtain your domain name, simply do a web search for domain name registration. There are a variety of companies that can register your domain name, such as Network Solutions.

First, you must check to see if your name is available. If it is, then it’s simply a matter of comparing prices and figuring out how long to register your name for, then choosing the best company for your needs. You can register your name for only one year or as many as you like.

Name registration is only half of the process. It does not mean that you have purchased “space” on the Internet to house your web site, but simply that you have reserved that name. However, many companies offer domain name registration and web space all in one package.

3) How do I get my web site hosted?

After your domain name is registered, you must pay for space on the Internet. “Space” simply means that you are renting storage room on a web server through a company that hosts web sites. Your web site will be saved to the web server, just as you would save a file on your personal computer, and be made available to visitors.

As with domain name registration, there is a multitude of companies ready to offer you web space. Care should be taken in researching the company that will host your web site.

4) My business is in Washington D.C. and you are in Vancouver.
How can we complete a project when we are so far apart?

Proximity today is not as important as it once was. With Email and World Wide Web, designing anything from websites to print graphics is extremely easy and very effective. We communicate via email or by phone, and will show you our progress directly online or as an attachment in your email. It’s actually faster today than the traditional way of sending via FedEx, UPS or general post.

5) What kind of pictures and graphics can I use on my web site?

Your site can be filled with all kinds of graphics and pictures to create the most pleasing experience possible for your visitors. Great web sites use color, design, and photos to maximum effect to provide both ease of navigation and full immersion in the site.

The one limitation to be aware of is that all graphics and photos are like other files—they have a size, measured in kilobytes (KB). The more graphics and photos you use, the more kilobytes are used on your page. How does this affect the web site? The more kilobytes a site uses, the longer it takes for its pages to load into the client’s web browser. If you have ever become bored and impatient waiting for a web page as it takes a minute or longer to load, it was probably because the page had too many graphics. The longer your visitors wait for a page to load, the greater the chance they will give up and move on to another web page.

Therefore, while graphics and images are absolutely essential to a site’s appearance, they should be used as sparingly as possible. The faster it is to navigate through your site, the better the site's impact will be. With the proliferation of high-speed Internet access, like Cable or DSL, this is becoming less of a problem. But as long as there are still huge numbers of visitors using dial-up modems, it is recommended that a web site be designed to accommodate these people as well.

6) Should I have my site designed in Flash or HTML?

HTML serves as the basic foundation for most web sites, and certainly it is the best option for having the site scanned by search engines. It is as old as the World Wide Web, but there are countless ways that other types of web languages, such as ASP and JavaScript, can enhance a “plain” HTML page into a highly effective and visually pleasing document.

Flash offers a more visually appealing look, most notably by adding animation into the mix. It’s a lot more than just a “cartoon”, however. Every year Macromedia finds new ways of integrating Flash with HTML and server side scripts, so most high-end Flash sites can now use data as powerfully as HTML-based sites. An added benefit is control of the site’s appearance: HTML and Javascript can occasionally produce different results in different browsers, while Flash looks the same in all browsers.

There are a few things to be aware of with Flash. According to Macromedia, about 3% of computer owners have browsers that do not support Flash (in these cases the Flash player is a free download for those who want it). Another downside to Flash sites is that they are less visible to search engines like Google and Yahoo. Finally, Flash is more expensive than HTML. In many cases, though, the extra money spent can mean the difference between a great site and just an average one.

Of course, these choices are not mutually exclusive. Flash can be integrated into HTML pages, providing the best combination of HTML’s universality and the bells and whistles of Flash animation.

7) Will I need a shopping cart?

If your business offers goods and services for sale, the obvious answer is ‘yes’, you will need a shopping cart. Online ordering is growing rapidly, and shopping carts build a quick, direct path between your customers’ bank accounts and yours! They are fairly easy to maintain, and in most cases the maintenance can be done by you, the owner, through a web-based administration system.

However, shopping carts add to the cost of the site, as the site’s designers will need extra billable hours of programming to set it up. Also, to take credit card orders over a secure network, you will need to pay extra to find a hosting company that supports secure connections (SSL) and open a merchant account with a bank that allows you to process the orders when they come in. For smaller companies, therefore, it is might be more financially feasible to have the pages designed to display a list of products with a telephone number or email address for orders rather than a full shopping cart.

8) What are the differences between web browsers, and how will
that affect my site?

The two main browsers used by web visitors are Microsoft Internet Explorer (the most popular) and Netscape Navigator. There are also a number of smaller but very good browsers like Mozilla and Opera. And not only are there different browsers, there are different versions of each. Netscape, for instance, has versions 4, 6, and 7, each of which has different features.

Think of a web browser as a series of different actors playing Shakespeare’s Hamlet. The words are always the same, but the reading of the lines is always different. Different actors play up different sides of the melancholy Dane’s personality, but the character himself is always recognizable.

Similarly, web pages, while fundamentally the same in all browsers, are often “read” differently by different browsers. A page in Netscape may look slightly different than a page in Explorer, and both of these browsers may look a little different in Opera. Text might be larger in one than the other, for instance, or the layout might change a few pixels here and there.

Web designers have a number of ways to counteract this. In fact, most web sites are designed to look the same on all browsers. Usually this can be done with a minimum of extra work, but with more advanced applications, such as those that require JavaScript, making a web page that looks the same in all browsers may require extra programming time. Be aware that advanced features are not always available on all browsers, and those that are can often require extra time and money to be made “readable” by all browsers.

9) Is there a fee every time I need to change or update my web site?

Once your site is completed, you have the opportunity to purchase a Maintenance Plan , if you do not wish to make changes or update your web site yourself. All plans are customized based only on the update services you request.

Another option is to have the site designed to feature an Administration section that allows you to update the site’s pages from your computer. This requires the use of dynamic pages, and costs extra at the design stage. However, the benefit of having control of your web site’s content without knowing anything about web languages can be enormous.

10) I already have a site and only wish to improve it?

We offer complete redesign of an existing site. We can use your existing text data and apply a new "look and feel" to your web site. This can be accomplished at a fraction of the cost of a brand new site.

11) How do I attract visitors to my web site?

By far the best way to attract visitors is to have the site listed with any of the Web’s large array of search engines, particularly Google, Yahoo, Alta Vista, Lycos, AOL, and MSN.

These search engines use “robots” or “spiders” to search the World Wide Web for your site. They look for certain “behind the scenes” elements of the site to figure out what it is and where it belongs among the millions of sites on the Web. This is a process that involves working closely with your web designer from the earliest stages of the site’s creation to figure out which audience to target using key words.

The key words you choose will be emphasized in the site, so that when these words are typed into a search engine, your site will come up. A site that sells candy will need to highlight the words “candy”, “confections”, “sweets”, and so on, so that when these words are entered into a search engine, the site will appear on the list of found web sites (preferably in a top position).

The key factor is the popularity of the key words that are emphasized. For example, it is much, much harder for a company that targets the word “candy” to appear at the top of the search engine list than it is for a company that targets the words “black licorice”. In the first instance, “candy” is so popular that thousands of web sites would come up in a search. But in the second case, “black licorice” is more specific, so fewer sites will come up, meaning the site will likely be near the top of the list..

While optimizing the site using key words is free for Google and other search engines, paid advertising is also available. This is typically called “Pay Per Click” advertising. You are allowed to choose certain keywords in relation to your advertising budget. Your site will come up on the search engines in a prominent location (usually at the top, or set off by a different color of text or box style) with a frequency based on the amount of money you spend. The flexibility of this plan is a big benefit, and the traffic on your site will almost certainly increase, often dramatically.

Paid advertising is not necessarily better than the free site optimization. It’s simply a way of helping yourself by making the playing field less level with competing sites—but it costs more money. If optimized properly, a site can appear in a good position on the search engines without paying for advertising, and the cost of optimization is much less than “Pay-Per-Click” advertising.