CHEAP WEBSITE DESIGN

Cheap website design often turns out to be the most expensive and you should consider using a professional website designer to build your website

So if you do find a web designer who is willing to work for the equivalent of £15 per hour, then what does that say about how he views his own skills? If he was any good, he could and would be charging you a decent rate for his services.

If you look at a website that cost £300 to design and then compare it to one that cost £1000 the differences will be obvious. One will be eye-catching, welcoming and appealing. One will project a professional image of the business that owns it. One will encourage people to make an online purchase or contact the company. The other will be the £300 website.

CHEAP WEBSITES

The problem comes if the £300 site you are looking at is your own one, because by then you will already have wasted your money. You could run with it if you want, but there's a good chance that it will do you more harm than good.

In my opinion, it is better to have no website at all, than to have a poorly designed cheap and nasty one that does nothing other than show you prospective customers how little you care about your company's image and reputation.

Usability & Navigation

How easy it is to use any given website will be determined largely by how easy it is to navigate. Ease of navigation is influenced by the overall design of the site (as discussed above), the way the information on the site is arranged, how the various pages are linked together, and the structure of the menu system.

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If you make things too difficult for people, they will go elsewhere. Make life easy for them and guide them effortlessly to where they want to be and they will stick around.

The first hurdle at which many websites fall is by having complicated splash screens that a visitor has to negotiate before they can get to the main part of the website itself. By splash screens, I mean those animated intro screens that appear - sometimes with a "skip intro" button but often without.

PROFESSIONAL WEBSITE DESIGNERS

Nine times out of ten, I don't wait for these to load and I don't even look around to see if there is a button to let me skip the intro and head straight into the main part of the site. All I do instead is give up and click the Back button and go to a different website instead. And I'm not alone in behaving like that.

Ironically, there a strong chance that the site owner paid an extra few hundred pounds for that splash screen, and yet all it has done is lose him a potential customer.

To me these splash screens are the online equivalent of having a high street shop where you had a big pile of old boxes just inside the front door that your customers had to climb over before they could walk around your shop and see what you had on offer. You just wouldn't do that in the real world, would you - so why do people think it is ok to do it with a website?

Another basic mistake people make when it comes to usability is to overlook the fact that not everyone uses a standard 17" monitor running at a 1024x768 resolution. Like many people, I use a widescreen laptop most of the time and I frequently come across a website where elements of the page appear in the wrong place because it has been designed to only work properly on a 1024x768 display.

Similarly, some people seem to think that the whole world uses Internet Explorer. That's not true. There are a lot of people (myself included) who use Firefox or other non-Microsoft web browsers. Often you'll find that a site has not been tested on anything other than Internet Explorer, so if you try to view it with Firefox you end up with bits that line up correctly, or images that have text written across them, or menus that don't appear, or any other host of annoying problems.

Here's a real life example - www.grapesense.com. I know this company and I have been on one of their courses which was excellent. I didn't actually book the course myself because it was a Christmas present. But if I had been looking online myself for a wine tasting course I probably would not have booked with Grape Sense. Why? Because if you view their site in Firefox, the main menu on the left hand side does not appear at all and therefore you have no way of navigating round the site.

CHEAP WEBSITE DESIGNERS

Recently, they have added a note at the bottom of the page saying that if the menu is not visible then you need to download and use Internet Explorer 7. No! Why should I do that? I'm your potential customer, and if you want a chance of getting my custom you should make sure your website works on all of the most common browser platforms.

I don't know for sure, but I would hazard a guess that this site was put together (I won't use the word "designed") by someone who did the job very cheaply. So, the site owner has saved a few hundred quid in web design fees. But over the past few years, how many bookings for wine tasting courses at £30 a time have been lost because people couldn't use the website? Even if it is as low as twenty, that's still £600 of lost business and that £600 would probably have covered the extra costs of having the website designed properly by a professional....

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Cheap website design often turns out to be the most expensive and you should consider using a professional website designer to build your website