use the categories on the right to learn more about the process of having a website designed and built by me, some of the more technical aspects such as hosting and getting the best out of a website after it's been launched.
if you have any questions that aren't featured here, please don't hesitate to get in touch.
domain names
what's in a name? a lot actually. it's probably one of the most important decisions you'll have to make early on as a lot of search engines will define their results by the content of the domain name. so if you want a website to promote your landscape photography and you want people to find your website with search terms such as 'landscape photography' then those words need to be in your domain.
a .com will place higher in search engine results than a .net or even a .co.uk. so if the names and .com's, .net's and .co.uk's are available, it's a good idea to register them.
hosting
your website needs a home, and there are many places your site can go - each with lots of different options. i recommend and use doteasy to host my sites and the sites that i build for people.
your hosting company needs to be reliable as having your site offline can deter potential customers. so don't just pick the cheapest, check out uptime statistics and customer reviews.
content
content is key. the text on your website needs to be engaging for new visitors and fresh, up to date for returning visitors. internet want to find answers to their searches quickly, they'll scan over text, picking out certain words and sentences to see if the site they are on is the one they are looking for.
so, your content needs to be clear and to the point, don't use long paragraphs of text when a couple of short sentences and a series of bullet points will do the job better. think how you can add regular, new content to the site - a news section for example.
e-commerce
selling online is becoming easier, and more affordable for individuals and small businesses. once upon a time payment systems were expensive to set up and high monthly fees added pressure to break even on sales. but with a number of different products available on the market website owners have a lot more choice.
if you are just starting out, and have a smaller budget for the early stages of your website then paypal is an easy way of keeping your costs down while still being able to take orders for your products via your website. there is no set up fee or monthly fee and you can accept payments from all major credit cards and paypal - your customer doesn't have to have a paypal account either.
the design & build process
after we've agreed to work with each other on your website, I will need some content so I can begin work on a number of initial design layouts.
i will aim to provide 2 or 3 variations of look and feel for your site, after feedback, alternations and decisions a single, static design will be worked up and then transferred to a web template.
i will then require the rest of the content for your website so this can be dropped into the website, I will regularly upload progress on your site to our 'test' server so you can check in and use the site at various stages in the build.
when the site is complete, it will be hosted on our test server for us both to check and double check before being uploaded to your own web space. elements such as contact forms, shopping baskets and check outs are then tested. when testing is finished and if there are no further additions or alternations to be made to the site, i will then submit your site to various search engines.
accessibility
one of the most important new buzz words in website design at the moment, but what does it mean?
website's need to be accessible to everyone and everything that will visit your website. the design and layout, and even the way that it has been put together should be accessible to all web browsers on all platforms - so that's internet explorer, firefox, safari, opera on pc and mac as well as camino, flock and other niche browsers. it's not just computers that will visit your site, mobile phones, pda's and game consoles. sites also need to consider visitors with a disability, partially sighted people will use a text reader to navigate your site. and a text reader isn't the only piece of software that needs to understand your website - search engine robots will crawl your site picking up content, so the content needs to be formatted in a way so the robot can collect all the good stuff to give you the best possible chance of being placed highly in search engine results pages.
search engines
a search engine is the most important method of someone finding your website and the world's most popular search engine is google, followed by msn, yahoo and ask. there are a number of ways to increase your position within the search engine results, the first is to register a domain name that contains keywords or potential search terms in.
when you site is online the most effective way of increasing your search engine results position is to have links from other websites to your own site. these links are a 'vote' for your site and the more votes you get the higher you will be. these votes can be scored as a page rank [find out yours here], to get a higher page rank you needs links from other sites, and the more popular the site containing the link to your site will equate to a larger increase in your page rank.
after i've finished your website, i submit your website to google, yahoo, ask and msn. submitting your site to these search engines notifies them that your site is on the internet, they then send a robot (which is a piece of software) to trawl the content and tags that are on your website - this will form the basis of what's in the search engines database for your site.
pay per click advertising
to gain additional and very specific, targeted clicks on your site - pay per click advertising is the way to go. i recommend and use google's adwords as it not only supplies the adverts on google's search results pages but many other website's too - where ever you see 'ads by google'.
and what's great about adwords is that you get to set a daily budget for your advert so you'll never overspend. setting up the advert is easy - you set your keywords, create the advert and set the amount that you want to pay when someone clicks on your advert - the higher the price you set, the higher up in the advertisement block you'll be for those keywords. you can create different adverts for different sets of keywords and then have the visitors land on different pages of your website. so if you are selling clothes you could create one advert for t-shirts and one for jeans, then when a user clicks on your advert for t-shirts they are dropped straight onto the page which features your range of t-shirts, the same for your jeans advert.
you can regularly check on your adverts to see what keywords are performing well and what others are under performing - and then adjust or even remove ones that aren't doing so well.