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.

Why we use Fresh Books

As a small creative solutions business specializing in web design, website development, hosting and graphic design – bookkeeping is not on top of our priority list. Although we really do like all of our affairs to be in order, we simply don’t have the time to concentrate all of our energy in this area.

When the time came around for our monthly invoicing it was both a happy & frustrating time. Happy in the sense that we were sending out invoices so we could get paid. Frustrating in the sense that it took several hours to generate invoices for clients, most of which were for very small amounts.

As if this waste of time wasn’t bad enough, sometimes we made mistakes. Since everything was done manually – human error was inevitable and common. On a few occasions clients received invoices meant for other clients and sometimes we forgot to add things to invoices. We lost a lot of money this way.

Another frustration for us was that sometimes clients forgot to pay and until we realized we had no cash to flow, we would be oblivious. Once the realization hit, we would have to manually draft emails (which felt awkward) asking our clients for payment. Sometimes we would have to resend these emails – if we remembered. Keeping tabs of who paid was also a chore…

… Until one day a little ad caught my eye, there it was “Fresh Books – online invoicing made simple.”

I signed up for a free account and set up my profile. I uploaded my logo and customized a few settings. Then I forgot about it. And when I did remember Fresh Books, I thought that it was going to be a task moving my whole way of doing things to their system. I guess my paradigm was in the place of knowing that my system kind of worked for me but this new way might not gel too well.

I carried on painfully sending out manually generated Excel & PDF invoices for a few months until I had absolutely had enough. I made a decision to actually shift my old paradigm and to give Fresh Books a proper try.

I was so serious that I purchased a paid plan. I uploaded all of my clients via a bulk import from a csv file. Exporting this from Excel was a breeze – importing to Fresh Books was just as simple. I setup access details for all and customized my invoice template. The last invoice number I used was inserted as my first invoice number on Fresh Books and away it went. The first invoice was a success!

Doing a bit of exploring I realized that I could set up auto recurring invoices – “wow this is cool,” I thought. What a neat feature since most of the small amounts we invoiced out where recurring fees for website hosting. I setup all of our hosting clients on recurring profiles and forgot about invoicing them again – it all happened automatically from then on.

“What about clients who don’t pay?” Well my question was soon answered with an automatic reminder facility. This feature allows me to set up to three email reminders. All of the text is customizable within the email subject and body. I could also space the reminders to go out on any given number of days from the time of invoice. From now on reminders were all automatic – very, very cool.

Once clients received their invoice notification via email and logged into Fresh Books, I was able to see that they had viewed the invoice. As soon as I received payment notification, I simply marked their invoice as paid and again they received an email message thanking them – all automated!

At a glance I am able to see what we have invoiced for the month, what has been paid and what is still outstanding. There are numerous other reports that can be generated. The Fresh Books system is truly a pleasure to use and I can’t imagine ever going back to my old way of doing things. Fresh Books has saved me valuable hours every month, not to mention the effort.

Check out how Fresh Books can help your business now!

There seems to be a huge mind block when it comes to traditional designers feeling that they are unable to design for the web, when in actual fact it is a rather simple transition.

I have heard several designers tell me that they are clueless when it comes to design for the web.  Some say it is because they were never taught web design in college or that the coding element scares them. Although I do agree that you should stick to what you are good at it doesn’t do any harm trying something you may be great at.

Any great print designer is not only creative, but understands the ins and outs of the print process. Designers understand the need for bleed, crop marks and colour separations.  They know what positives are and how they are used, they also understand the difference between litho, digital, web and screen printing. They know about UV Varnish, spot gloss, embossing and matt lamination. Whether to lay a job out for work and turn or work and tumble. Quality designer also understand their medium, so they know about paper types, grammages, coatings and uses.

If print designers know so much about the print process are they also classified as printers? Absolutely not! The key here is that they understand the next process and this understanding is what gives them the edge over others. Knowing exactly what the print process entails ensures that their jobs get done quickly and properly without any costly mistakes.

The very same principles apply to web design. This is what makes the transition so simple. In web design you are still designing on a page where proper layout and typography rules still apply. The difference is that designers are now free to use some interactivity with this new medium and if mistakes are made they are easily corrected at no great cost.

Great web designers should understand the next process which is development. This doesn’t mean that they have to understand high-level mark-up languages and database integration. Neither does it mean that they need to be able to create dynamic applications from scratch. What it does mean though is that web designers should understand how their design will be implemented and used. They should understand the advantages and limitations of (X)HTML & CSS. The knowledge of exactly how your design will be used will assist you as a designer to ensure that nothing distorts or gets left out in the development procedure.

Most web designers today have a firm understanding of (X)HTML & CSS and some even branch to other areas like Flash, Wordpress & JavaScript. The ability to take your design and create a working template is an advantage that you really want to have. Great web designers are sought after especially since the market is flooded with mediocre and terrible ones.

Be creative, be brilliant, be exceptional, but above all be yourself!

Give a little and get a whole lot in return!

Selfishness has a bit of a destructiveness way about it. It causes us to focus inward, clouding our vision and eventually causing an implosion. SPLAT!

I decided to give a little!

We are all faced with busy lives, daily stresses and struggling to pay the bills. Our lives automatically push us into a place where we are continually thinking about our problems and the issues that we need to deal with. It becomes so easy to become self-centered, even though it is more than likely unintentional.

To break free from the mold of self, we need to adjust our focus to that of an outward one. It is only when we focus outward that we see that our problems are rather small or sometimes insignificant.

My time is incredibly valuable to me. I run a time based business. A creative solutions firm, specializing in web design, website development, hosting, graphic design, flash development, animation and email marketing campaigns. Time wasted is costly! Not only is it costly financially but wasted time causes pressure in other areas of life as well.

So I’m a busy person – “Big deal, get over it!”

I decided to take a little time and give something back. I created a directory for all of the South African Website Design Companies and am offering free listing to web design companies across South Africa. It feels great to do something for the greater good of others. The directory is going to help us all!

How do I feel? GREAT!
I actually feel like I have had a bit of a rush – I like :^)