When it comes down to using your website as a business tool, all the the bells and whistle in the world won’t necessary keep money coming in. Surprisingly enough, many business owners want a website but they have no idea of what they want the website to say. It’s not unusual for business owners to have a basic vision of what their site is going to be like and yet, they still have no idea of what the website should say or do. If you fall into this category, then read on.
The Preparation
Well preparing for your site design will help your designer to determine “what you want in your web site?” This is an essential step. Usually you will be given a website questionnaire to provide the details, and I can’t stress enough that The more thorough you are, the more you know what you really want for your site the better to make the process smoother and eliminate time delays.
Hosting
The first thing you should do when building a website is to find a Web hosting provider. I would recommend bluehost and hostgator which you can purchase via mysite. You find this on the sidebar.
The Plan
Knowing what you want from your website will make it easier and quicker to make decisions about the content and presentation. The best strategy to plan your website is to start by first reviewing the websites of your competitors, to give you an idea of what things you should put on your website. Spend Time Creating A Creative Brief . The brief will form the starting point for your designer to understand your website specifics, as well as your specific goals. Preparing this information in advance will reduce the risk of communication delays via telephone or email. You can assist the designer by sending all the required items such as any text, photos, logos and website or design examples. You designer should ask you to fill in a website questionnaire for you to complete.
Outline A Draft Site Map
This step will provide the designer with a big picture of your design expectations. You can choose to draw a draft and scan the document, or compile a list of all pages and links or create the document in Microsoft Word, Excel or PowerPoint. If you’re using a wordpress theme to build your site then layout is already fixed
Prepare Content In Advance
This is the number one project killer in the web design business. If you’re writing content during the design process, you risk receiving a design that does not suit your content. Another reason to prepare content as early as possible is the fact that ideas and thoughts often change during the writing process.
Planning Pages and Choosing a Color Scheme
This is an important thing to think about before you get started, because you want to keep your main navigation consistent. The more organized you have the web pages the better. I think it’s a good idea to keep the number of buttons in the main navigation down to 7 or less web pages to making it look too busy. With a content rich site you can make use of drop down menu pages.
The color scheme is also an important thing to consider. The designer can help you find the exact colors, although it’s usually good to keep the website design’s main color scheme simple. If you have too many different colors in the design it starts looking busy. Using up to 3 colors makes your color rich images stand out more.
Group Your Changes & Submit Them in Bulk
You can reduce frustration for both parties if you compile a list of changes and submit all of them to your web designer at the same time. This can also help to reduce the delivery time by enabling your designer to focus on the actual design process, rather than individual change requests.
Even though you will have submitted your website questionnaire there may still quite a bit of communication between you and your website designer, so its only fair that resonable and timely communcation is vital during the process to complete your site, If your website designer is waiting quite a while to recieve a response from you, you then can’t expect them to get your site done asap. If your web site is not progressing the way you hope it would, step back and take a look at your invovlement in the process of your site design (or lack of!) before you make any complaints. The smooth process of your website design requires resonable and timely communication between you and your web designer, as well as all the necessary elements to build your website.
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