Want vs. Need

There will be many features and modules that you may want on your website. The more the better, right? While it is fine to add many features, remember not to add so many that the website is cluttered or appears disorganized. Also the more features you ask for, the higher your final bill will be. So now ask yourself the following questions to determine what you want, and what you need, on your website.

• What kinds of information do you want on the site?
•  How big do you think your site will be?
• Who will your target audience be?
• Will your site require regular updates? Who will maintain it?
• Will you need a database to store and retrieve information?
• Do you want to rely on search engines to send more traffic to your site?
• Will you be requiring an e-commerce application?
• What is your timeline going to be?
• What is your projected budget? 

Finding the Right Designer

There are many places to look for a skilled designer. Some examples include Craigslist, local service directories, search engines, and even the yellow pages. One of the best ways to find a web designer you can trust is by asking around. Referrals may not get you the most talented web designer in the world (unless of course you are asking very wealthy people for referrals), but they almost always get you a talented, cost effective, and trustworthy web designer.

Below are some tips to help you in your quest.

• Make sure they have their own website, if they do not they should not even be considered.
• Avoid template designers. These ‘designers’ buy or create a popular template, then simply fill in the blanks with your information. Your website then looks just like every other website they create. How do you know if they use templates? They will advertise with a set rate fee, often “$100 special” or “24 hour turn around for $299″.
• If their website is is of low quality, yours will be as well.
• If they do not offer personal phone support do not hire them.
• Find out if they outsource. Many companies outsource their work to India, these websites break often!
• Never hire a designer who requires more than %33 down before any work is done.

Final Steps

Once you have found a designer that you like, check their portfolio and contact a couple of their past clients. Past clients will tell you if their experiences with the designer were positive or negative. Navigating to referrals on your own gives you a higher chance of the referrals being legitimate. Now all that’s left is to figure out the pricing, sign any contracts, and get started on your website!

One thing you should always keep in mind is that freelancers are often dealing with an uncertainty of work, therefore they are often willing to negotiate. If a freelancer does not offer to do the work on your budget the reason is a mix of two factors, price and workload. These two factors coincide constantly. If you low ball a price when the freelancers workload is low, they will be more likely to negotiate. If you low ball when they have more work than they can handle, they will most likely reject your project. If you experience the later scenario, and you are not in a rush to complete your project, request that the freelancer contacts you when they have a lack of new jobs.

Give your freelancer a deadline. Without a deadline a freelancer may put off a project, especially if they have other projects they are working on simotanously that do have deadlines. Be reasonable with your deadline, and expect to pay more or risk the quality of work if the deadline is very short.

More to come…

1) NotePad 2
Notpad 2 is essentially Notepad on steroids, and best of all, its free! Notepad2 was publicly released in 2004 by creator Florien Balmer who released it under the BSD Software License. Notepad2 features syntax highlighting which is essential when writing in any programming language like PHP or ASP.       Visit Site

2) ColorPic
Today there are many eye dropper applications made available freely online. None however offer the same level of functionality that is offered by ColorPic. ColorPic easily modifies image colors and even saves your color chips as palettes that can be called in future use. ColorPic will even snap to the nearest web safe color if you tell it to!      Visit Site

3) Core FTP
As a web designer you cannot go without an FTP (File Transfer Protocol) application as it is the middleman between your harddrive and the world wide web. Core FTP provides you with many features like SFTP (SSH), SSL, TLS, IDN, browser integration, site to site transfers, FTP transfer resume, drag and drop support, file viewing & editing, firewall support, custom commands, FTP URL parsing, command line transfers, filters, and more.      Visit Site

4) TopStyle Lite
This is a very handy little tool for creating CSS files. You can preview CSS while you write it, create pleasant color schemes for your site, and it even validates your CSS against multiple browsers.      Visit Site

5) Stock Exchange
Stock photography is a must when designing visually appealing websites. It also happens to be rather pricey and if you or your client are on a budget and can often be out of reach. That is where Stock Exchange comes in. They have massive quantities of stock photo’s and illustrations available completely for free, all you have to do is register.      Visit Site

Well, there you have it, feel free to offer any suggestions you feel should be added to the list.

Image and Flash Content
Like Splash Intro Pages, Flash and the heavy use of graphics are common trends for people wanting a modern and trendy website. The downside of this is a lack of the HTML based text that is needed by the search engine crawlers. One common mistake is to embed text within an image or Flash fine. This can be avoided by simply using CSS to overlay text over an image or Flash file using divisions.

Duplicate Content
Search engines frown upon copied content. This includes content from other websites, as well as content on your own website. Ultimately the more content you have, the higher you will most likely rank. If you have multiple pages with the same content, or content that matches a competitors website, your ranking will actually go down. If your lacking content ideas it is fine to look to other websites for inspiration, feel free to take what they have and improve upon it. Adding your own twist to it could be the key to pulling traffic from competitors websites, to your own.

Lack of Content
While your website should not be treated like a pad of paper where you write down everything on your mind, it does need a fair amount of content to rank higher. Often times site owners do not plan their websites out properly and fail to include enough room to for necessary text content. Need content ideas? Write down a list of keywords that you think could be used to search for your website. Now go over each word, one at a time, and brainstorm sentences or paragraphs that can be created with that word. Once you have done this with a some or all of your words, read the sentences back to yourself and with an open mind you will always find ways to seamlessly merge them together.

Improper Coding
This is one of the most common mistakes, but also the easiest mistake to avoid or fix. Simply adding small amounts of code to certain tags will actually improve your search ratings. These include “alt” attribute in the image tag, different titles on each page, adding “meta tag” keywords and a description in the head of the page, and ensuring that each tag is closed. With a WYSIWYG text editor you can make these changes in less than 10 minutes per page.

Last Day Dream [HD] from Chris Milk on Vimeo.

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