Website design with a clear, direct approach. Some of the important considerations in developing your web site are as follows...

 

1.	Your Domain Name - Your first decision is whether you use the name of your company as your domain name (the domain name is what follows the www) or if you use a word or words that summarise your service or product. If you will rely on advertising or promotion to bring in visitors then using your company name makes the most sense. If you plan to bring in most new customers via search engines, then your primary service or product should be embedded in the domain. The domain name is one of the five criteria search engines check when they decide how high to rank you in a search. For some search engines it makes the difference between a high ranking and a low one. Please allow us to register your domain name for two reasons. Firstly, transferring domain names is one of the main problems in our industry and secondly, we can offer you domain name registrations at a very low price.
2.	Your Categorisation System - People are at their most impatient while on the web. Making your message quick and easy to read is essential. This means your site has to load quickly. To make an immediate clear impression means you have to categorise your service or product into easy to understand categories that will load quickly. We guide you to not overwhelm any one category with too many graphics or words. We create your navigation system to directly reflect the categories you use to communicate your message.
3.	Your Graphic Choices - We work from photographs, disks, e-mailed jpgs, transparencies, or electronic brochure material.
4.	Choosing Your Text - We do not charge for text if you transmit it to us electronically. We just lift it from disk or e-mail and drop it into your site. Assistance in site copy is also available if required.
5.	Web Site Traffic - traffic to your web site is typically generated in the following ways:   Incoming Links Bringing in incoming links is time consuming and can only be programmed at the end of the link that the link comes from. It requires contact with the site you want the link from. Free incoming links are available but the results are unpredictable. Vendors will often provide free incoming links but they may be tied to quotas or exclusivity demands.   The productivity of an incoming link depends on the market you serve. Quality varies from market to market. There are relevancy issues such as whether the page a link comes from is highly trafficked, has many incoming links, and is similar in content to the page it is linking to.   This is therefore something for you to consider…..who are you affiliated with in your industry whereby you can obtain an external link or even exchange links? This may be an association, a partner or supplier or a complimentary service or product provider to your industry.   Advertising and Promotion All your advertising, promotions, stationary and electronic email signatures should be accompanied with your www and email address.   Pay Per Click (PPC) A Pay Per Click (also known as Pay Per Ranking, Pay Per Placement or Pay Per Position) search engine enables you to list your site at the top of the search engine results. You pay only when a searcher or clicker clicks on your listing and connects to your site. You don’t pay to list; you only pay for clicks or click throughs. You can list your website by selecting keywords that refer to your product or service. For each keyword you determine how much you are willing to spend. The higher you bid the higher you will appear in the search results.   An account with a PPC search engine is a great way to drive targeted traffic to your site because you only pay for actual clicks to your site. It is risk free and a cheaper alternative to optimising listings with the big search engines. Advertisers need to be wary however, of PPC search engines that offer clickers money or incentives to click through their results.   Search Engines A very high percentage of referrals come from Search Engines. It is therefore imperative your web site is registered with the top search engines in order to maximise traffic to your site. Every web site is registered with the top search engines including…..     The five main search engine criteria that we code for are....   Your Domain Name – As previously mentioned, the letters that follow your www are highly regarded by many search engines. If you are not depending on advertising or promotion for most of your business, then consider imbedding your product or service within your domain name. Those words are most often used to find your site in a word search are the words you need to consider inside your domain name.   Web Site Text - The first and last sentence of a web page hold a big attraction to many search engines. We often place a single sentence chocked full with key words as the introduction to each web page. The text within your page is also very important. Search engines rate a page according to the percentages of a key word or words appearing in the text. This percentage varies from search engine to search engine. In addition, sites created using frames confuse many search engines. Often they will read the wrong frame on a page giving a low ranking to that page. We only create frame pages upon request.   Web Page Title - There are search engines for whom the title is extremely important. Your key words should appear in your title line. Every page is your site will receive a title.   Hidden Description - Not visible on screen is a coded description of your site. This is a single full sentence with your key words within the text of the sentence. Many search engines pay close attention to this criterion.   Hidden Key Words - Not visible on screen is a list of key words associated with your site. Some search engines will note eight or more words in this coded section. The more words used, the lower some search engines will rate any single word. The trick is making sure specific pages on your site are densely clustered around single concepts requiring relatively few key words to get across your message. We devote your introductory or splash page to communicating the big picture: the full spread of what your site has to offer with all possible key words recorded in the key words section.

 

Now that you have a clearer understanding of the design concepts, the following is a typical delivery schedule for a project:

 

	Project Outline - Summary
Week 1	Define & Discover:  Schedule clarified; technical needs addressed and clarified; scope of the project and deliverables defined; project plan created and approved; user testing and maintenance needs addressed and clarified. Creative brief composed (based on client survey) outlining vision and perception.  Best Practices identified (competitive analysis conducted); begin initial audience profiling.
Week 2-3	Structure:  Site structure defined; navigation and page flow developed. Sitemap completed and approved by client.  User profiles created and user tasks defined.  Create content-delivery plan.  content acquisition and editing/writing started. Wireframing of primary and secondary pages begins.  Establish navigation, page flow, content organization, and layout and user paths.
Week 4-5	Design | Prototype:  Present first round of page design/layout.  Design of "look and feel" sign off -- further art production if necessary; UI begin.  Necessary materials are digitized. HTML prototype developed following page flow and UI design.  Content is collected, modified, and finalized.  Production of design template begins.
Week 6	Production | Launch:  Production begins using prototype as outline and structure.  HTML production and tagging begins, incorporating content and design. Testing, and building.  Confirming all browser and platform compatibilities. Beta version of site is live, sign-off, internal testing, QA Public launch, announcements, set up maintenance, post-production meeting.

Please contact us today with any questions or to request a free proposal for your company’s website design.