Without a doubt the most critical single item of a website yet also the most neglected is the home page. First impression mean a lot, your website’s home page has to accomplish several different tasks and do them well in a short period of time or your visitors will leave. These tasks are: (more…)
Creating a great web design is a balancing act between many varied and sometime contradictory elements. A website needs to please different groups of people and accomplish several functions at the same time. It combines left-brain, logical thinking and right-brain, artistic thinking. The average user or even owners of websites have little knowledge of what all goes into a truly great website, therefore I have compiled a list of the different things a website must accomplish to be considered great.
Some web designers charge you like you’re getting a custom web design, then give you a template. There is a huge difference in price, if you are getting a template design the price should reflect that.
Designing your website to meet current web standards ensures that your site not only looks good on current web browsers, but will most likely continue to look great on future web browsers too.
Who was it that said “if you build it they will come” because it’s not true online. How many websites have failed because the person assumed that visitors would just magically appear, I met with a business person recently who had spent many thousands of dollars on an eCommerce website that had, over the course of many months, sold nothing at all. Building a website without search engine optimization is like putting a retail store at the end of a dark alley and then (more…)
The task of keeping a website’s content fresh and up-to-date can be a daunting one, yet it’s of utmost importance to the success of that website. Adding a Content Management System (CMS) to your website makes updating content a snap, but until recently these were very expensive to implement. The cost of implementing a CMS is much lower today than it was a few years ago for a couple of reason (more…)
There must be a great deal of easy money to be made selling SEO (search engine optimization) services, or at least that’s the impression I get from all the snake oil salesmen that seem to be hawking SEO these days. Not that I don’t recommend search engine optimization as an important step in creating a successful website, I definitely do, but if you’re going to spend your hard earned money on SEO you need to make sure you’re getting your moneys worth. Unfortunately because the average person has a limited understanding of what goes into SEO they are easy targets for dishonest businesses.
If you are planning on paying for search engine optimization services you should get answers to the following 5 questions before choosing a company.
I’ll let you in on a little secret of web design, search engine optimization does not necessarily produce a successful website, better expressed as SEO ≠ $. While it’s true that search engine optimization (SEO) is very important to a website’s success it is by no means the only element of it’s success.
The goals of individual websites may differ quite a bit, for one the goal may be to get a visitor to buy a product, while another may be to get a visitor to call, or fill out a form to request further information. Whatever the end goal is, reaching that objective is called a conversion (more…)
It’s been my experience that most clients enter into a web design contract knowing no more about what they’re doing than they do about molecular biology. I wouldn’t hire a carpenter to build onto my house without some knowledge about what he was doing so I could know I wasn’t being ripped off and I wouldn’t go into surgery without reading up on the procedure first. An educated client is a happy client and produces happy web designers, therefore I present my list of 10 things you should know about web design. (more…)
Web designers are more like mechanics than doctors. Everyone knows somebody who has been ripped off by a mechanic, you know, that slick talking mechanic who really sounded knowledgeable when he told your wife she needed blinker bulb fluid. That’s not to say all mechanics are bad, but there are enough dishonest ones around to make you cautious about where you bring your car. Doctors on the other hand, seem to be mostly reliable. Sure you hear the stories of the person who went in for a tonsillectomy and ended up with a vasectomy instead, and about malpractice lawsuits, but usually these are stories you read about in the newspaper or see on television, they don’t generally happen to people you know because they just don’t happen that often. (more…)
Your website may look great but how is its performance? A website is a lot like a car in this way, it is important for it to look good but the real test is in its performance, where the rubber meets the road so to speak. If your website is not out there bringing in new business through search engines then you’re broken down on the information superhighway.
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