Web Design Hastings

What do you want your website to do?

I'll start by letting you know what a website can do. The most common kind of websites are electronic brochures. These are an extension of any business literature you have but a whole lot cheaper. The purpose of these websites is to offer existing customers a resource of information, whether that is support for existing products, reference information, contact details etc, as well as attract new potential customers.

Once you have gathered all the answers, these are the realistic goals your website must achieve. Remember, a website isn't an ornament, it's a powerful business tool.

Get a feel for a design

This is where you need to spend time looking at other websites for a design that suits your image and your market.

Get a mental picture of what you want your website to look like.

This is important as it's what a designer will spend your time and money on so take away much of the work by giving them lists of websites you like the look of and note the reason for liking it.

Be aware of the ongoing costs

These are the ones to watch. Your domain name, which is your name on the web, eg. www.johnspetshop.co.uk and the hosting, which is where your website is published to are the only mandatory annual costs involved.

Bear in mind that powerful hosting can cost very little money. Some even include domain names in the price.

Have a look at the list of providers below.

As you can see, quality hosting packages at very little money.

Even if you round it up to £20 a year, remember that price when being quoted by the design agency. They may justify higher prices by offering more webspace but how big is your website going to be? Rarely are they over 1 Mb and if you have lots of images, maybe a photo gallery to publish, check the total file size of all the images to see how much space you need. Forget future proofing too, all good hosting providers will easily be able to scale the service to your needs so don't pay over the odds.

Update contracts

Will your website require frequent updates? Would you like to frequently update your website but the idea of £££'s put you off? Well, that's where open source content management systems come into the arena. Technically publishing platforms, or bloggers, they are free and offer you all the power a website can deliver. This very website is powered by Movable Type.

I would very strongly recommend you look at using WordPress as a tool to power your website. It offers an authoring interface to allow you to publish pages and content as you please and best of all it's completely free. The requirements are that the hosting provider offer PHP and MySQL, both of which I have stated above and cost very little.

WordPress is very simple to setup and administer so make sure you get a fair quote for setup. I can set WordPress up in 10 minutes without a hitch. What will need doing is applying the design to the template but this is CSS driven and fairly straightforward for any self respecting design agency.

Alternatively, you could buy into a contract that let's the agency do the updates but please check the costs of this.

Technical specification of the site

This is very important. Your website must adhere to the UK's Disability Discrimination Act which suggests making reasonable adjustments to your website to be accessible to people with disabilities. There are a set of guidelines published by our old friends the W3 called the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines or WCAG.

You can see the guidelines in all their glory here.

They are not pretty but make a lot of sense and must be followed. There is also another rule to follow too. Code validation. It is important for your website to be validated as it ensures that many of the accessibility guidelines are met and that many user agents, such as browsers and search engines, can all access the data efficiently.

Code validation is at http://validator.w3.org. You can run your website through the checker to see if it is valid or not.

Website marketing and optimisation

If you want a hope of your website to work for you then you must implement a marketing campaign to succeed. How this is done will vary from company to company but make sure that a potential design agency clearly identifies your target audience. Don't prompt them either, if they're good, they'll be telling you things you never thought to consider.

Search engine optimisation is done during construction and involves clever use of keywords and phrases within certain elements of the page. You can read my SEO article which will shed more light on this particular subject.

The article also covers how to promote and market your website. You can outsource and by all means let the agency quote you but be aware that before spending any money on a marketing campaign you must have statistics that analyse and log all referrals so you know what is working and what doesn't. Stats are critical because not only do they track users, they track your investments in pay-per-clicks, directory listings and other means of promotion.

Use the search engines too. If you're looking for a company to promote your website, see where they appear on the search engines. If they're on page 4 then how are they going to get your website on page 1?

Final

I hope to have given you something to think about before approaching a web design agency. Do your homework first and don't be put off by the above. A website written and promoted correctly is a powerful tool that can offer huge benefits to any business.

Good luck with your new website.

Further reading

• Search engine optimisation and website marketing
• The benefits of building a standards compliant website