Website Development

Detailed Description

Describe what you are looking for in as much detail as possible. Give examples of images you like and more importantly images that you dislike. The more information you give the closer the look and feel will be to what you want.

Multiple Variants

The designer should present you with three different designs or rough ideas in the form of images. These rough ideas will give you the customer the opportunity to select the direction that you want the website to follow. For example if you requested a cartoon style face, then the designer may come back with Daffy, Mickey and Donald. These three choices, or rough sketches, will allow you to visually see where the designer is taking you.

Enhanced Choice

You must select one choice. This choice will then be developed further as per your recommendations. For example, you may have chosen Donald and the picture may have Donald chewing a carrot. You want the picture to show a pensive Donald and suggest that he should have both ears down by his side looking pensive. These directions are very important and will lead the designer to the resulting image.

Final Draft

Following your directions the designer will make changes and allow you one further consultation. This consultation should be used to enhance the draft image and not to completely change the image. Once your comments have been adopted the designer will complete the image and supply a quality version.

Should you fail to adhere to the guidelines then you may be subjected to further charges as per the terms and conditions of the agreement. Remember that images require a designer's time and energy and as a result can become costly if you do not articulate your requirements fully to the designer. If you select an image that you do not like, the designer cannot be held accountable. This process is as much about your articulation as the ability of any designer.

Content

You will be required to supply the word content for your website. This may not be as easy as it sounds. Try sitting down with a pen and paper and telling someone you have never met what your website offers. Should you have prices? Should you speak directly to them? Should you make the site search engine friendly?

A website needs information to be laid out clearly and concisely unless that information needs to be complex and wordy (like this document). Our website is telling our clients all about what we do without the specifics or prices.

We have taken the decision to empower our potential clients with knowledge of the software process, as we believe this demonstrates the quality of our company. If we simply show prices and packages, it is difficult for them to know what they are getting?

The word content you propose should be spell checked and checked for grammatical mistakes using a word processor. The company you choose to write your website cannot be expected to do this for you unless you pay them to do so. Web design systems do not generally have spell checkers built in so this makes it hard for a designer to check your words.

Remember each website is different and requires a different amount of work.

Search Engine Optimisation

Building a website is fine but you cannot expect to get new customers unless you spend time and effort fine tuning your site for search engines. Getting a high Google Ranking is paramount if your site is to be found. Simply designing a site and expecting people to find you by accident is a waste of money.

There are many things you need to do to achieve a high rank. Like anything to do with software, ranking should be treated as an engineering project. There is science behind the process.

The following process should be adopted for a successful ranking project. It is also fair to note that ranking takes time. You cannot upload your new website and see an immediate result. Google sends out sniffer applications to look at websites on a regular basis. The applications then gather information on your site and update their central database. It is only at this time that your site can be ranked.

The following is a brief list of design criteria that should be adopted in order to achieve a good ranking include:

	Avoid using frames and fancy code inside your site
	Password protected areas are invisible to Google
	Google cannot read text in images
	Google ranks pages and sites based on traffic and external links
	Use tags inside your code to show what your page means
	Text describing what you do helps decide your importance
	You can buy advertising space on Google
	You cannot buy a good ranking from Google
	Every website is different
	Keep the site simple
	Ensure that all links work

TOP TIP:

Reserve a budget for search engine optimisation. It's the best advertising budget you will ever spend!

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