Choosing the right designer for your small business can be hard if you do not know what you should look for. Here is a simple guide that you can use to make sure you ask the right questions and make an educated decision every time.

Steps

1. Find a website design company. The easiest way is to google them or look in your phone book, but this is not neccessarily the best way. Good web designers are usually found by word of mouth, or reviews put out by other companies. Another good place to look for design companies would be web design directory sites that list companies in your area / country.
2. Evaluate the website design company’s site and own portfolio. Any company can say they have great designs but a company’s portfolio should speak for itself. To adequately judge a website you must look at: Quality of design, ease of use, initial impressions, how the site compares to others in the same industry, consistent look throughout each site, and ease of navigation.
3. Ask them what their technical expertise is. Don’t be afraid of bringing specific things up such as: Do they test on Mac and PC? Do they offer cross-browser compatibility testing? Do they offer Search Engine Optimization? Do they use templates? Do they have their own servers? Do they consider accessibility and standards? These are things that are often overlooked, but are very important.
4. Look at their attention to detail. Sometimes the smallest things can make all the difference. Look for: Page titles – each page should be unique and descriptive. Terms of use pages – every site should have a terms of use and a privacy statement. Use of contact forms rather than published email addresses – this will reduce spam.

Tips

• A lot of the things may get a bit technical; if you have a computer savvy friend, to assist when you start the consulting process.

Warnings

• Search Engine Optimization techniques can be tricky, beware of any company that promises to get you in the top 10 search results.
• Never pay for a website quotation – this should be a free service offered by design companies. However if you require a full scope to be compiled, this would be charged for.

If all else fails and you don’t feel like searching to the ends of the earth for a web design company that you think you can trust… Just contact Freedom Studios – we’ll make the process easy.

Article provided by wikiHow, a wiki how-to manual. Please edit this article and find author credits at the original wikiHow article on How to Choose a Website Design Company. All content on wikiHow can be shared under a Creative Commons license.

I must say that I am still stunned!

How can the organisors of an international rugby test match allow for a stoned reggae singer to completely disrespect the South African national anthem? Surely when you select a person to sing the anthem you need to have seen them sing it before or at least let them rehearse it for you.

I am a huge rugby fan – a 100% fan of the Sprinboks, but I must say with a rendition of the anthem that was turned into a laughing stock, I can hardly blame them for playing so poorly on Friday evening in Toulouse.

What confuses me is that this reggae dude is from South Africa. I don’t know a South African that is able to stuff up the national anthem that badly – it is a true disgrace!

For those that did miss the messed up national anthem you can view it below:

Apparantly the name of the stoned rasta dude is Ras Dumisani, a reggae singer from Durban, Kwazulu-Natal, in South Africa. Ok that is even more scary – I never thought that any self-respecting South African could do that to the national anthem.

Sources later revealed that he had actually did have a rehearsal before the match that was fine – so “pot,” I mean what went wrong? Something seriously changed between the rehearsal and the actual rendition – I suspect it was a banned green substance that was the  culprit.

Ras, along with the French have issued apologies to South Africa, but fans and citizens alike still have a bad taste in their mouth.

Ras has now become the butt of many jokes, one shown below is based on the classic Windhoek Lager adverts.

For those who don’t know the words to the South African national anthem, Ras you’re included, here they are:

Nkosi sikelel’ iAfrika
Maluphakanyisw’ uphondo lwayo,
Yizwa imithandazo yethu,
Nkosi sikelela, thina lusapho lwayo.

Morena boloka setjhaba sa heso,
O fedise dintwa la matshwenyeho,
O se boloke, O se boloke setjhaba sa heso,
Setjhaba sa South Afrika

South Afrika.

Uit die blou van onse hemel,
Uit die diepte van ons see,
Oor ons ewige gebergtes,
Waar die kranse antwoord gee,

Sounds the call to come together,
And united we shall stand,
Let us live and strive for freedom,
In South Africa our land.

Here the phoentetic version to help you to learn it:

Some more jokes related to the butchered South African national anthem:

You have just discovered a website that you this has some really useful content that you would like to re-visit. You also think that the website would be really useful to your friends or colleagues. How do you save and share this link?

Before you would copy and paste the link somewhere and email it, or perhaps add it to your browser’s favorites tab – but with the tools available today, the process is a lot easier.

While many users are already aware of these tools, we just wanted to share them with you in case you haven’t tried them.

As the web gets more and more profound, and there’s more to read and remember, browser bookmarking becomes less and less desirable to internet savvy users. Social bookmarking is a method of bookmarking which is posted online, catalogued with comments and “tags” (labels for your bookmarks), and shared with your friends.

Steps

1. Decide which site you are going to use to store your bookmarks; the most popular tagging site is http://del.icio.us/ , which is now owned by Yahoo!. We will use this site, but the steps correspond to most social bookmarking sites. Other possibilities include Furl, BlinkList, and Magnolia.
2. Register at del.icio.us. After registering, del.icio.us will allow you to add some buttons to your browser. Follow the instructions- these buttons are important for bookmarking. There are many ways to add bookmarks to del.icio.us, including a Firefox extension, but we will use this method.
3. Once you register with del.icio.us, say with the username “xyz”, you can view all your bookmark online as http://del.icio.us/xyz .
4. Say, for example, you would like to bookmark wikiHow. Go to the main page, and click the “Tag” button that you added to your browser. This button will bring you to del.icio.us- the website and title are already filled in, so add some comments and some tags. Tags for wikiHow would include “wiki”, “howto”, and “reference”. Separate these tags with spaces to distinguish them. These tags will be useful later when you are trying to find a specific bookmark.
5. You can navigate del.icio.us by URL; for example, you can see all the bookmarks saved by you and other users who have tagged with the description “wiki” at this address: http://del.icio.us/tag/wiki . This applies to any other tag if you switch the word.

Tips

• Make sure you use the same tags for the same things- keep a core list of tags in your mind.
• Del.icio.us has a feature which allows you to group similar tags together, called “bundles”. For example, the tags “baseball”, “coins”, and “stamps” would all be grouped together under the bundle “Hobbies”.
• Social bookmarking is meant to be social- invite your friends to use the service. Once they have registered, you can apply the tag “for:friendsusername” to let them know that they should check out that bookmark. When they log in (this works both ways), del.icio.us will embolden the text “links for you” at the top of the page. If they click that link, they will see that you have tagged something for them.
• Most del.icio.us pages have RSS feeds- you can subscribe to your friend’s bookmarks, a specific tag, bookmarks for you, your bookmarks, etc.
• Del.icio.us also allows you to subscribe to specific tags inside the website. Click subscribe at the top of the page and add that tag you want to be up-to-date on. You can also subscribe a RSS feed of your subscriptions.

Social bookmarking tools we personally recommend:

• Stumble Upon » http://www.stumbleupon.com/
• Digg » http://digg.com/
• Delicious » https://secure.delicious.com/

Sources and Citations

• Video: Social Bookmarking in Plain English
• What is Social Bookmarking?
• del.icio.us help
• Tagging
• del.icio.us tools

Article provided by wikiHow, a wiki how-to manual. Please edit this article and find author credits at the original wikiHow article on How to Use Social Bookmarking. All content on wikiHow can be shared under a Creative Commons license.

Freedom Studios has had an initiative called Loopie World for quite some time, but we decided to give it a boost and really share it with the world.

Loopie World is a website which houses a collection of free children’s stories that are based on the cute and crazy little characters called the Loopies. The free kid’s stories are updated every month and are 100% original. Each story comes along with a great illustration and a downloadable PDF version.

We initially created the Loopie World website three years ago, and yes since it is one of our own initiatives and not one for a client, it has taken that long to evelve into something from the top shelf. I guess it just seems to happen that way in business, you tend to place all of your focus on paying clients and your own projects have to take second place.

So what exactly have we done to improve Loopie World:

Well the site started out as 3 static pages and a mailing list sign-up. That’s it.
Next it transitioned into a website with more pages and a few links to stories, but still nothing special.
We eventually found the time to re-deign the website from scratch and gave it a much more creative look that would be appealing to kids or parents looking for stories for their kids. We added the stories as we published them – when we got time to publish them. The result was that we had a nice looking website with some good content on it but it never got updated because we just got too busy and alas it was kind of forgotten.

Recently we decided that is was a shame that such a gem of a website would be left on a heap and serve very little purpose, so we decided to pump some jet fuel into the project and take it to the next level. We converted the entire website to work with the WordPress CMS. This allows us to add new kids stories quickly and easily. Next we added a whole lot of useful plugins to make the site work even better and be more customised for our purpose. We added all of our content and decided that we wanted to make it work for us. While we will always offer free children’s stories at Loopie World, we wanted to create something sustainable, so we created the premium kids story club.

We now offer a membership of just $7 per month. Membership gives you four additional children’s stories every month, each one illustrated and exclusive. Members also get access to special content that is not available to anyone else. We will soon be adding audio versions of all of the premium kids stories as well as interactive books.

An additional feature that we will be integrating is an online store where we will sell all of our great Loopie products. Some nice interactive games will also be added so that kids visiting the site can have a bit of fun as well.

The premium stories are in the process of being completed and will be ready for our members by the end of October 2009.

At present these are the free children’s stories available to download:

• The wobbly car
• The Christmas Star
• A Piratey Adventure
• Granny Goes Away
• Pancake’s Pancake
• The Space Adventure
• The Rainbow Maker
• The Baking Contest
• A Present for Tubblie
• A Loopie Christmas
• Wusky’s Undersea Discovery
• Pilot’s Plane
• The Midnight Feast

Please would you visit Loopie World and add it and / or the stories to your social bookmarking links.

Showing up on search engines is one of the most critical ways to increase website traffic and expose your content, product or service to people who might be interested in what you have to offer. Most of the major search engines utilize an algorithm to determine where a website ranks. The search engines have set up specific criteria that a website must meet to get to the top of the list. The criteria are different for every engine, but all engines share several commonalities. It all boils down to the type and amount of content provided on a given website, the level of optimization done on the site, and the popularity of the website (link popularity/PageRank). Tailoring your website for improved search engine rankings is also known widely as search engine optimization, or SEO.

Steps

1. Research the keywords. Decide what search queries you want to show up for. Do some research on how many people are actually searching for your site. Many times it is best to consult a “natural search engine optimization” professional during this process. There are several tools available from Google, Overture, and third party software developers that can make the keyword research process easier.
3. Think outside of the box. Don’t just focus on your main keywords. The first thing to realize when targeting keywords is that it is not all about ranking for the most popular keyword. The most successful search engine marketing and optimization campaigns target the most relevant keywords. For example, if you are a realtor in a particular area, don’t just optimize your site for “real estate.” Optimize your site for dentist, florist, movie theaters, etc. You would be amazed how many unique visitors will come through to your site when “outside of the box” thinking occurs.
4. Focus on the end user. If you spend too much time trying to please the Search Engine Spiders, you may forget about the end user. Think about what your target market needs to accomplish their goals, and then put it on your site so that they can find it. The phrase “content is king” was born about 6 years ago, and it still holds true today. If you want to be relevant for specific keywords, than you need superior or at least highly competitive content. Write about 225-300 words of copy for each keyword and plant it on your site each day. Grow, grow, and grow. On average, one can target between 3-5 like keyword phrases per page. Make it as natural as possible and the Search Engines will reward you with a first-page ranking.
5. Make sure that all the pages of the site have custom titles and descriptions. If your site is using the same tags for all the pages, you are not helping search engines figure out the subject or relevance of your individual pages. Regarding Meta Tags, there are 2 very important fields:
   • Title Tag – arguably the most important SEO tag for any website. Google supports approx. 60 characters in the title, while Yahoo allows for up to 110 characters in the title. It is important to target the most critical keywords in the Title. Every page should have a unique Title.
   • META Description Tag – also very important for every page on the site. Some engines do display the description defined, while others do not. All search engines do read the description tag, and do utilize the content found within in the ranking process. A good rule of thumb is to create descriptions that do not exceed 200-250 characters. The META keyword Tag is essentially useless in today’s SEO market, but is oftentimes good to utilize as a placeholder for the keywords targeted.
6. Keep the structure, navigation and URL structure of your site simple enough for search engines to follow. Remember that search engines cannot parse your navigation if it’s using flash or javascript. So try to stay close to standard HTML when it comes to Navigation. URLs with dynamic parameters (?, &, SIDs) usually do not perform when it comes to search engine rankings.
7. Create a site map that tells people where everything is on your site. You will get about a 1% click through rate to your site map. However, it will do wonders for those who know what site maps do, and the Search Engines will like it as well.
8. Build up your popularity. So now you have determined the right keywords on the right pages, you’ve created all of the necessary content, and you’ve optimized all of the content to the best of your capabilities. Congratulations – you’re now in the top 80th percentile (from an optimization standpoint) of the websites listed for the keywords you’re trying to target. So how do you get a 1st, 2nd, or 3rd page listing? The answer is quite simple: You have to be the most popular, too. That’s right, it’s a popularity contest. In other words, how many other websites know you (link to you), and how popular are they? This is typically referred to as link popularity, or called PageRank by Google. The more sites that link to your site the better, and the more popular the site linking to you the more value you will receive for your link popularity. The best types of “link building” are directory registration, text link advertising, and press release distribution. Try to offer valuable information or tools so that other people are motivated to link to your site. Well-linked sites (that don’t use spamming) do better in search engines.

Tips

• Search engine algorithms assess the relevance of your page to any particular keyword by the content on your pages. For instance if you are selling “widgety widgets” on your site and you do not mention “widgety widgets” on your page text, search engines have very little to work with. Also make sure that you are not spamming search engines by using the same keyword over and over.
• Although not as important as they used to be, reciprocal links do still matter with Google. Reciprocate with similar websites and include keywords near the links on your site.
• If you want to optimize well for your city, state etc., make sure to sprinkle geographic search terms throughout. Include it in text as well as set apart. Search engines do not know where you are unless you tell them.
• Bold and italics can make your keywords stand out more with the search engines.
• Interior links within your site will improve SEO; Sitemaps are a great way to generate internal links and make your website better too!
• Correct broken links, search engines do not like dead ends.
• If you have over 30 keywords that mean business to you, then you might want to hire a Professional Search Engine Copywriting firm or outsource it to freelancers.
• Anyone who can go to google and type in “keyword research” will find very many tools that mixed with common sense should suffice quite well.
• Now when digging deeper to understand the traffic patterns of certain keywords use Wordtracker’s GTrends Tool. You can get an idea on the amount of competition on Google compared to the amount of searches. Now these numbers are far from accurate, But if you can kind of step back and take a broader look at things, don’t worry so much about the numbers but compare the trends since it shows the past history. See if its steady traffic, traffic that is going extinct, or traffic just starting to peak. By using this tool, you can many times find some golden opportunities.
• It really comes down to just using common sense. Just sit down and think, “What would other people search to find this? What would I search for to find this?” Try phrases in your keyword research tool to get new ideas and find the higher trafficked most targeted phrases. DO NOT look at the numbers spat back out at you by these programs as accurate numbers, they rarely are. You can still use these tools to get ideas on new keywords, search patterns of users, and many other things, that mixed with the information of trends in that area, can really help you.

Warnings

• If you are going to use freelancers, beware of duplicate content. Always make sure to check the content that you get by searching for the content on Google, Yahoo, and MSN.
• Never have hyperlinks like “click here”, hyperlinks should always be keywords, long hyperlinks with multiple keywords are even better.
• Don’t hide content.
• Don’t create duplicate websites.
• Remember that if you use black-hat SEO techniques, you run the risk of getting penalized by the search engines and having your web site permanently removed from their index.
• Use decent search engine sites not little ones like Ask and that!!:P

Sources and Citations

• Keyword Research 101
• Keyword Discovery
• Link Building 101 :: The Key to Successful Link Building
• SEO Software

Article provided by wikiHow, a wiki how-to manual. Please edit this article and find author credits at the original wikiHow article on How to Improve Search Engine Ranking. All content on wikiHow can be shared under a Creative Commons license.

I received this pathetic email scam today:

Email Subject: Notice of Underreported Income

Email Body:

Taxpayer ID: graham-00000174073547US
Tax Type: INCOME TAX
Issue: Unreported/Underreported Income (Fraud Application)

Please review your tax statement on Internal Revenue Service (IRS) website (click on the link below):

review tax statement for taxpayer id: graham-00000174073547US

Internal Revenue Service

My Comments:

Firstly, I am not a US citizen, neither reside in the US nor have a job or business in the US, so that pretty much rules me out from being a tax payer to the IRS.

Secondly examining the link more closely (I have deactivated it in this post for safety), the link actually goes to some spoof domain that looks kind of legit to untrained users. I wonder how many people these guys will doop?

Content still reigns as the king in the world of Search Engine Optimization. Some websites get on top of SERPs because of high-powered link building campaigns, but when you talk about visitor loyalty and traffic retention (and yes, public consumption), it will always require that good ol’ optimized content

Steps

1. Readers first, then keywords. In the previous years, SEOs follow this trend: “keywords first, then content”. Now that Google has become more sophisticated, and integrated more complex numerical linguistic methods into its algorithm, webmasters found out that it ain’t just the keywords that matter, but the related terms that revolve around your content. That means you can’t just repeat the word, “cheap cars for sale” twenty times in your paragraphs. It needs more substance (and related words) t han that. It’s almost like writing for your readers alone, and not the search engines. But of course, it’ll be Google and the others who will determine your rankings.
2. Diversify Anchor Text Links As Aaron Wall pointed out, there has to be some variations in the text when one creates those blue-highlighted anchor tex t links. The links on a page are what the search engine spiders follow in determining your website structure. Most likely, the text used in the links are being considered in figuring out what a page is all about. You may also set some keyphrases in bold letters. That tells the spiders which terms you’re trying to emphasize, just don’t overdo it.
3. Take note of word count Although it’s been a classic rule that “readers online do not read”, it simply doesn’t mean that one has to deprive the online users of good, meaty content. Stick to at least 250 words a page. SEOs know that writing down for an appropriate length of text means being more able to include more related terms for the target keywords.
4. Social Bookmarking If the content is real good (i.e. controversial, substantial, significant to a great part of the crowd), then it’s best to digg it, make people reddit, and tag people at delicious. News items are great at Netscape.com.
5. Social Networking Share your blog announcements, latest promos, or any significant tidbit of a fact at your bulletin and Group posts at MySpace, and any other social networks you find helpful in bringing traffic to your site. Just a tip: Make it short and sweet in your bulletin posts since a bulletin is supposed to be quick.
6. Content Submissions Good quality traffic from reputable websites like ezinearticles, goarticles, and isnare will help out in traffic and visibility. It might hurt your rankings though, because these sites are deemed “authorities” or of great value by Google.
7. Blogging does a good job at sharing and syndicating content. If you have a website, and a separate blog (checkout: Link Building with your Blog), it’ll ease out the load in gaining visitors.

Tips

• A SEO-friendly content is no longer the restrictive, robotical-sounding content it used to be. Search engines, in their aim to continuously refine search are catering more to the online readers, the social aspect of the World Wide Web. Content comes out to be more human-centered, and ready for consumption.

Article provided by wikiHow, a wiki how-to manual. Please edit this article and find author credits at the original wikiHow article on How to SEO Your Website. All content on wikiHow can be shared under a Creative Commons license.

from wikiHow – The How to Manual That You Can Edit

As webpages develop into more sophisticated works of art, it becomes necessary for designers to use different techniques to attract a viewer. One technique that is utilized is the animated .gif graphic. The animated .gif allows a designer to inject movement into webpage graphics to draw the attention of the viewer. There are many software programs available that allow the creation of these graphics. One such program is Adobe Photoshop Creative Suite 3 (CS3), which will be used for our tutorial. It is important to note that this tutorial requires basic knowledge of Photoshop CS3, along with experience using layers. For beginners, please refer to the Related wikiHows and Sources at the end before to become familiar with Photoshop CS3. The following tutorial, created by the Fighting Engineers, describes how to create an animated .gif graphic using Adobe Photoshop CS3.

Steps

1. Create a document with each frame of the animation on a different layer.
2. Select the layers to be used in the animation from the layers palette
   • Note1: To select a group of layers, select the layer at the top of the group. Then hold the shift key and click on the bottom layer and this will highlight every layer in # Open the animation palette by choosing window from the menu bar and selecting “Animation“.
3. When the animation palette opens, it should look like this. If it doesn’t that means it opened in the timeline view.
4. Change to frame animation view by clicking on the flyout menu in the upper right hand corner of the animation palette and selecting “Convert to Frame Animation”.
5. Change every layer showing on one frame to every layer showing on its own frame, by clicking the flyout menu on the animation palette and choosing “Make frames from layers”
   • Note: All layer don’t have to be selected, to select a few layers use the copy layer button at the bottom right of the animation palette to add layers.
6. Modify each frame by selecting the frame on the animation window and changing it as desired in the main photoshop window.
   • Note: To add or remove a graphic from another layer to any frame r, select the frame and in the layers palette, click the “eye” to toggle on or off the visibility for that layer.
7. Under each frame is an arrow head pointing downward. Click on the arrow head to display timing menu and select the display time for each frame.
8. From the file menu select export to export the document as a movie or under the save as option save the file as a gif. Be sure to select Save for Web and Devices (.gif under this option).
9. NOTE: If you want to loop your animation continuously you can select that option in window that pops up after you have chosen “Save For Web & Devices”. Under the color table that shows up is “Looping options”, just select “forever” and save it. You can also pick “others” and select the amount of times you want your animation to loop.

Article provided by wikiHow, a wiki how-to manual. Please edit this article and find author credits at the original wikiHow article on How to Create Animated GIFs Using Photoshop CS3. All content on wikiHow can be shared under a Creative Commons license.

I can’t begin to exclaim how important it is for your website to receive inbound links. These links could ultimately be life or death to your website.

Inbound links? What are they exactly?

Inbound links are links that come from other websites directly to your website. The more websites you have linking to your website, the higher your search engine ranking, which means more traffic. Ultimately the importance of inbound links lies in pushing your site up the search engine rankings, but they also have a deeper purpose. Visitors from other websites that click through to your website  will most likely do so because they are interested in what you have to offer – which means you would have achieved getting interested prospects on your site with minimal effort or money.

Are all inbound links to my website effective?

While inbound links are highly beneficial and integral to the growth of your website, there are certain links that are “Evil!” Search engines like Google want to see legitimate and relevant websites linking to yours. While having links from an irrelevant site is not at all detrimental, having paid links from a link farm can be.
A link farm is a website that asks you to pay for links. Usually these linking websites have unconventional and unethical ways of getting search engine rankings and Google especially has become wise to this. A while back these link farm websites where very successful, but now Google actually discredits your website heavily if you are involved with a link farm.

What is an online directory?

A directory is a website that lists thousands of websites under relevant categories. This helps visitors browsing the site to find what they are looking for a lot quicker. Listing your website on a directory site can help your search engine ranking and drive visitors to your site.
There are hundreds, or perhaps thousands of free online directories which allow you to list your site. Some will ask you to include a reciprocal link (a link back to their website), others will just give you a one way link (better than those requiring reciprocal links) and others will ask you to pay to have your website listed in their directory. While the paid directories are usually of a high quality and will usually ensure a better ranking for you, there are some that are just a waste of money.
My opinion is that you should never give up the opportunity to have your website listed in a directory, but if possible always try a list it in a directory that is more relevant to your website and industry.

How do I find online directories?

Well how do you find anything? Simply Google “free website directory” or something similar and you will be met with search results that will keep you busy for quite some time.

Some other good ideas to get inbound links…

Why not consider linking to, and receiving links from people in your industry who are in another country. They will most likely not really be your competitions since the demographics of your target markets will differ. If you are selling your good internationally this may not work for you, but for most of us it is a great idea.

Start a blog.

Writing about what you know best should come naturally to you – you are unconsciously doing it every day by promoting your business, why not just put it into words? Blogs also get indexed and raked by search engines very quickly and are a great way to get visitors. People that read your blog will start to admire you for being an expert in your field and are much more likely to contact you when they need your product or services.

Write articles.

Articles are filled with rich key words relating to a certain topic. When you write an article in your area of expertise and submit it to a top article directory, the amount of quality traffic you can attract is mind blowing! Although writing articles generally takes a bit more time and concentration than writing a blog entry for example, the results are well worth it.

Does all this really work?

Well I can personally say that it does! Freedom Studios does not use any conventional methods of advertising. All of our prospects and ultimately clients come via our website or via word of mouth referrals. Most prospects either find us via search engines or through relevant sites linking to ours.
Getting all the inbound links has not been a quick process, but it sure has been well worth it. Why don’t you give it a try? You never know, you may be pleasantly surprised.

This might sound a little “out there” but I think there is a serious misconception among the general public & small businesses.

For years people have been playing around with WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) HTML editors and claim that they are web designers – sorry to break it to you, but they are NOT web designers, they are novices. I can personally recall occasions where potential clients have grumbled about the amount I have quoted them. Their response is often: “But my 16 year old nephew can put together a site for a fraction of that cost – why should I pay so much to you?” Or “I have quotes from other companies that are charging half of what you are – if you lower your quote we’ll give you the business.” In the beginning I found comments like these rather intimidating and I would try and accommodate these new clients even if it meant slashing my prices beyond it being worth my while. Mistakes I will not readily make again.

What I discovered is that clients that are not willing to pay you adequately for your services are usually the ones that will have the least amount of respect for you as well. These clients will probably expect you to leap through hoops of fire and give you completely unreasonable deadlines. They don’t respect your time and will most times make you change things over and over again.

The professional web design process is a lot more involved than most people realize. Again I say PROFESSIONAL web design process. The steps to designing a website that works great, looks great and attracts a great amount of traffic is both time consuming and skill intensive. From obtaining a proper brief to conceptualizing and designing an accurate visual proof – there is just something different about the way a professional works. Obviously the result achieved when the project is completed speaks volumes in itself, but most don’t understand the processes in between.

A professional web designer has to understand the principles that make up a great website. These include: aesthetics, content, structure, usability, relevance, technology & optimization.

Aesthetics:
There is nothing worse than a website that just looks bad. A poorly designed website is off-putting and reflects negatively on the company it represents. It gives the appearance that the company is unprofessional and the content contained within the site cannot be taken seriously. However a well designed website gives you the feeling that you are dealing with a professional & credible company who knows what they are talking about.

Content:
Granted having a great looking site does a lot for your business image, but if the shell is empty visitors will leave fast and probably never return. Your website content should be relevant to your industry sector and relevant to what you say you’re all about. Your content may be relevant, but id it is poorly written or has countless spelling errors, again the impression created is poor. Content should be well written, aimed at web users who are not interested in long winded stories, but who are looking for headlines and condensed paragraphs. Users want to find relevant information quickly and easily – the more you make them work to find information, the faster you will lose them.

Structure:
A website with no structure just seems to fall apart at the seams! A good structure affects your appearance, navigation, sitemap, and usability. Professional web designers don’t rely on WYSIWYG editors to put a website together, but rather have the ability to hand code every element involved in building a great site. Having complete control over the code helps one to ensure that the structure of the backend code stays intact and that it is clean. A good structure will ensure that there is a certain uniformity in the way a website looks & works.

Usability:
A sure way to lose visitors quickly is to have a site that is not user-friendly. If your navigation is hidden or so unconventional that users are unable to get to pages easily, they will leave and not return. Naming of your pages and titles of your links should also be as common as possible. It does feel good to get creative and break the mould sometimes, but people feel comfortable with what they know – they have a certain sense of security in knowing what to expect. For example: A much wider audience will respond to a button called “About Us” than would respond to “Get the low down.” The latter may seem more creative or informal, but will prove to be a lot less effective. Another important aspect to ensure is that your website works across browser platforms – a professional web designer always has this in the back of their mind, amateurs probably don’t even understand what this means.

Relevance:
Why has a visitor come to your site? How have they found you? Most would have come via a search engine after looking for something specific. If your website content is not relevant to what the user searched for, they will simply get irritated and leave your site immediately. There are a lot of tricksters on the internet and experienced users have become wise to their ploys. One of these being attracting visitors under false pretense or directing users to their website using keywords not relevant to their site’s content. If you have quality content that is relevant and well structured, you are almost guaranteed to keep visitors on your website longer and have a greater chance of them bookmarking your site for future reference. They may even be inclined to share your site with their friends.

Technology:
Today the web is alive with technology! It is a nice touch to harness some of this and incorporate it into your website. Professional web designers should have their fingers on the pulse and have a good understanding of all of the latest technology offerings. If there is a better way to do something, it should be done. Especially if it assists in aiding usability and simplicity. Amateurs will most likely be ignorant to new technologies and if they have some form of understanding, will most likely not be able to implement it correctly.

Optimization:
This is the last point, but is one of the most important. Optimization is a key factor in your website getting found by search engines, which in turn drives free traffic to your site on a daily basis. I have dealt with companies that have spent vast amounts of money promoting their website, but have missed huge quantities of free traffic simply because their website was poorly optimized. A professional designer will always develop a site that is optimized for search engines. They will understand what is needed by large search engines like Google, Yahoo & MSN, but also what is needed by the lesser search meta search engines. I can use our own website as an example of this: http://www.freedomstudios.co.za relies completely on web traffic to generate new business. Freedom Studios spends absolutely no money on conventional advertising and constantly attracts quality clients who find us via search engines or directories.
Some of our clients also enjoy top rankings in Google simply because their sites are correctly optimized, relevant and have a lot of quality content.

An amateur may charge you a lot less to create a website, but the potential loss for your business is unimaginable. While hiring a professional web designer may be a slightly higher initial investment, your returns will most likely be worth a whole lot more.