WEBSITE DESIGN ADVICE AND HELP

Website design advice and help from the authors of the Golden Web, a guide to making money on the internet starting with good website design

When Paul told me that he had put my name down to write a chapter for the Golden Web book that was simply entitled "Website Design" I must confess I found myself feeling a bit daunted by the prospect. It's not that I don't know anything about website design (quite the opposite in fact!) but it's just that it is such a huge topic that it is hard to know where to start with it and even harder to know where to stop.

Being a logical kind of chap I think it makes sense if I start at the beginning and establish first of all what we mean when we talk about website design.

To most people reading this, I suspect that website design simply means the process of creating a website. And so that is what this chapter will be about - i.e. how to go about building a website. In reality, as you will see throughout the rest of this chapter, website design is actually just one aspect of creating a website. But to keep things simple, we'll use the term "website design" to refer to the whole process of building a website.

DIY Websites v. Professional Website Design

The first decision you need to make when designing a website is to decide whether you are going to do it yourself or whether you are going to get a professional website designer to do it for you.

Build web pages here and drive traffic to your website

Advertise here and get more visitors to your website

WEBSITE DESIGN HELP

For some reason, website design seems to be one of those things that people think can be done by anyone who "knows about computers". As a result, lots of people go off and build their own websites or get a friend or family member to do it.

Why??

Would you ask a mate to build you an extension on your house, just because he happened to be interested in bricks or because he once saw someone else build a garden wall? Would Gordon Ramsey take on someone as a head chef who had no formal training but who enjoyed throwing a dinner party for friends?

No, of course not!

And yet when it comes to website design, people seem to think it is ok to ask someone with no training, experience or qualifications to do the work for them. Worse still, a lot of these amateurs even get paid for the work they do.

If you were opening a shop in the local town and were serious about making a success of it, you'd get professionals in to fit out the shop, do the window displays and make the signs for the shop front.

If you are serious about making money on the internet, then your website is the online equivalent of that town centre shop. So apply the same thinking and get a professional team to carry out the website design work for you.

Failure to do that will mean you end up with a site which looks amateurish, maybe doesn't function correctly, and will give people a poor first impression of your business.

WEBSITE DESIGN ADVICE

Of course, there will be some people who will say "that's all very well, but I don't have the money to pay for a professional website designer". My answer to that is that if you can't afford a professionally designed site then you should keep saving up and wait until you can afford it, rather than rushing in and trying to get it done for free or on the cheap.

The internet opens up a global marketplace for your business. Instead of being one little shop in a town centre with a few hundred passing customers each day, your website will exposed to millions and millions of potential visitors. But by the same token it is also exposed to vast amounts of competition. Instead of being one shop in a town centre with maybe fifty shops, it is now competing against every other one of the millions and millions of websites that exist today. In the face of such competition, a cheap and nasty looking website just isn't going to cut it.

MAKING MONEY ON THE INTERNET

I once summed this up quite succinctly for a potential client. To spare his embarrassment, I'll just refer to him as Mike. We had quoted Mike something in the region of £1500 to design his website. Mike said he thought that was expensive because he had a mate whose teenage son had offered to do it for £400.

I had a quick look at this teenager's own website and saw some examples of his past work on the portfolio page. These sites were awful - clashing colours, nasty animation effects that were last in fashion in the mid-1990s, pages that didn't look right on a widescreen monitor, etc etc....

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You are reading an extract from

The Golden Web - The Internet Entrepreneur's Definitive Guide to Making Money Online

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Website design advice and help from the authors of the Golden Web, a guide to making money on the internet starting with good website design