Starting new online project
When you are ordering a new website the first question is: what you should provide me with, as website designer, to get your new website? Quick answer is: your ideas and thoughts about design (links to favourite websites as examples), text, images, requested functions, and before publishing, choose an ideal domain name, title of website, description and keywords. Let’s go into it in more detail.
Web design and layout
First what you want to see is some visible results as soon as possible which will make you satisfied. Please let me know your ideas on what the design or layout should look like. You can describe it by mail, phone call or at a meeting. Also please send me some links of websites, which you like, let me know your favourite colours etc to enable me to ‘tune in’ to the image you want to project.
Writing and reading
Please, prepare and provide content. Write some text about you, your company, products and/or services. While you are preparing the content, I will apply, in the new layout, dummy text in lorem ipsum, so you will see the typographical design and how much text should be inserted. If you have no idea what kind of text to write, I can help. I will interview you and create quality content.
Too much text for presentation is annoying. Visitors are mainly searching for what they want to find. Everything must be user friendly. If you want write more and more, a blog is a better approach.
Printing business card
It is a small but important detail right at this point. Be ready to update contact details everywhere. With your new website I can make stylish business cards.
You will get a proper PDF printing file (CMYK, 300dpi, crop marks) which can be printed by professional companies anywhere. If you need new letterhead, envelopes, flyers, billboards or gifts with printed logo, just let me know. Get it printed professionally and on quality paper. I can recommend Conqueror, the king of elegant papers, for corporate purposes.
Making it visually interesting
Your text information has to be inserted between graphic elements like pictures. It is great to provide your own high quality photographs. Visitors will have a chance to see your real services or real products.
To catch visitor attention, your website must be pleasing and visually interesting. Text needs to be presented in clear typography and also provide a visual feeling.
If you don’t have your own pictures, you can order photographic services (which I can provide), or I can buy illustration images for you from photobanks. For reasonable prices these photo stock agencies are selling images in high resolution with strict control on quality and technical aspects such as colour balance or composition. A good thing is that you know you are buying and publishing images legally. Payment is for these is safe and secure, of course.
I prefer three photo stock agencies: photodune.com, fotolia.com and shutterstock.com. Especially on shutterstock.com you can find photographs of some of the world’s bestselling photographers.
If you would like to read more about photo stock agencies, the relevant link is at the end of this article.
Functions and mobile devices compatibility
The website structure should be simple; simple means comfortable for visitor’s browsing. The website menu has to be clear. Easy navigation is part of graphic user interface. Simply decide what sub-pager you want.
A standard part of your website is a contact form with AJAX (no reloading the page while using form) and with spam protection. If you would like to have some specific enquiry form, newsletter system or some specific visual behaviour, please let me know please before making a quote.
From January 2015 I prefer building up new responsive websites on WordPress. This content management system provides great flexibility for design and functional needs with amazing technical support. You can also update content by yourself, or ask me to handle new updates and requests if you are too busy with other things.
Your new WordPress website won’t use some cheap uniform design theme. It will be a customised and ‘hand-crafted’ design especially and only for you, so nobody will say ‘ahhh, I know this design, it’s just a theme’.
Preparing an individual quote
The fee for services is set up for each client individually. The standard price is set between 600-700 EUR. It can go down by up to 200 EUR when you just need a good-looking online presentation with a standard corporate design which looks better than your competition. Also the price can go up if you want much more of my effort and time to create quality design with a developed sense for each of the graphic elements and you need me to work out ordering or booking forms, ordering or booking full system, setting up e-shop and so on.
To make it simple, you can also write down how much you would like to invest in the new website. Good motivation means some services for free.
Part of the deal is standard SEO optimisation, tuning up the speed of website loading and installing a few useful verified plugins. Payment can be by bank transfer or credit card over the safe and secure PayPal payment gate in any currency. An electronic invoice can be written in English, French, or German.
Time to publish your new website
Once you approve the design and we have settled the content (texts, images and other components), it’s time to publish everything and make your new website alive. This process takes a day or two. Polishing the details can take longer, but the website can be visible.
Part of the polishing process is SEO optimisation, minifying files for faster loading, compressing images, adjusting little details, better formatting of paragraphs and headings, adding codes and files for search engines. Also the pages will get optimised for viewing in mobile phones and tablets as well as on regular computer screens.
Search engines
Here are the key things which you should provide to maximise searchability (SEO).
Title of website: this will be visible in search results page. Your sentence cannot be longer than 60 letters with spaces. Use your name, or name of your company plus a short sentence with the most important keywords. It must look perfect and catch the visitor.
Description: visible in search results page below Title of website. Sentence(s) cannot be longer than 160 letters with spaces. These sentences should describe the content of your website (content as in type of information, products and/or services). Use the most important keywords.
Keywords: provide ideally the 25-30 most important words which have been written in the content of your website. Choose words which are relevant and which you guess people will use in searching. If you want to include in your keywords some word not mentioned in content, this keyword is totally useless. But if you really want use this word, create some text where this word will be used at least 3-4 times (and also used in heading).
Connections from social networks
Social networks are very useful for SEO. If you don’t want to use and look after them because you just don’t have time, we can just make a profile, publish basic information and link to website. That’s it.
Statistics
It is good to see how many people visited your website, which keywords were used, how long visitors stayed on your pages and then use this to tune up the content and keywords later.
Get super domain name
The domain name is the address of your website, eg something.com It can be your name or business name. Ideal is a domain which includes your most important keyword. If you are selling flowers, domain could be flowers.com but this domain will be already taken – registered. You can make some alternatives like freshflowers.com, flowersdelivery.com, thomasflowers.com, … your domain name should be easy to remember. Shorter is definitely better.
A few years ago there was just the standard top level domains .com, .net, .org, .biz, … and country domains us, .co.uk, .ca, .it, .de, .ru, … Today very creative domains are on offer, so you can get anything.nyc, .sydney, …, .club, .news, .expert, .party, .dental, .design, .photo, .news, and many others.
Choosing good web hosting
Very important is to choose the right web hosting provider. It is a company which is providing the space where your website will be stored and accessible on the internet. And which company is the right one, no matter where you are located in the world? Definitely it’s Siteground.
Read more:
Article about photo stock agencies
Article about web hosting services