WEBSITE DESIGN HELP AND ADVICE

Website design help and advice a guide to why professional website design is worth the investment and why cheap website designers are a waste of money

I explained my concerns to Mike and said to him "If you're really concerned about saving money, here's what I suggest you do. That lad wants to charge you £400 for a website. I tell you what - give me half of that."

"What? £200?" Mike asked.

"Yes. £200" I said.

"And what will you do for £200?" asked Mike.

"Absolutely nothing," I replied, "but I will have saved you £200. Because if you pay your mate's son £400 you'll get a website that does absolutely nothing for your business and you'll be £400 lighter. Give me £200 and you'll have the same end result but you'll know where you stand right from day one and you'll only have wasted £200 instead of £400."

WEBSITE DESIGN ADVICE

Mike thought for a moment and then accepted our original quote of £1500 for his website.

As a result, he ended up with a website which enhanced his business and made him money.

Websites That Work

To me, the key thing in determining whether a website is working properly is to look at whether it is making money for your business and/or reducing your costs.

Any web designer worth his salt will look not just at the aesthetics of your website but will also talk to you about how the site will make money and what can be done in terms of the design to maximise the earning potential of the website.

Build web pages here and drive traffic to your website

Advertise here and get more visitors to your website

WEBSITE DESIGN HELP

As well as having the potential to make money, a website might be used by a business to reduce costs and hence increase profits. For example, a firm of solicitors might decide to have a website that incorporates an online case tracking system for property conveyancing. The case tracking system allows clients to log in at any time of the day or night and see how their house sale or purchase is progressing. Although this does not directly make extra money for the solicitor, it does mean that the receptionist will spend less time taking phone calls from clients chasing up the status of their conveyancing and so means that the business becomes more efficient. This in turn can lead to a reduction in admin costs and hence an increase in profits.

To ensure you have a website that works to its true potential, your website designer will need to pay attention to a number of factors: the design, the usability and navigational structure of the website, the development and programming, and the search engine optimisation.

Design

A lot of people underestimate the importance of using a professional graphic designer to create the design of a new website. And yet, getting this aspect right is vital.

If you design your site yourself or get a friend who knows a bit about computers to do it for you, then you are unlikely to get good results.

If done correctly, creating a design for a website (like any other design work) is a highly skilled job. It requires a combination of natural artistic talent and a good dose of formal training.

CHEAP WEBSITE DESIGN

Naturally, the kind of people who have that rare combination of natural skill and the necessary years of training expect to be properly paid for their services. As a result, a properly designed website will cost you upwards of £1000.

Creating the design for a website can easily take 10 hours, once you factor in the time spent creating the initial graphic design, then the time take to make any tweaks and changes that may be requested by the client, and then the time required to take that graphic design and convert it into an HTML web page format.

Add to that the four or five hours taken to apply that design to all the pages in the website and add the required text and any other images to each page and you're looking at something approaching a twenty hour project even for the most straightforward of websites.

If a website designer offers to do all that for £300, that means he is offering to work for £15 an hour. How many skilled professionals do you know who charge themselves out at £15 an hour? Would you expect to pay £15 an hour to a plumber, an electrician, a solicitor, an accountant, or anyone else? My hairdresser charges over £20 to cut my hair and she does three appointments an hour!....

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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 help and advice a guide to why professional website design is worth the investment and why cheap website designers are a waste of money