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Having your website designed?

When having a website designed you may want to consider a few things before instantly commissioning a web designer for the job and diving straight in. This short article will help to make the process clearer and guide you to take things into consideration that you may not have already thought of.

 Things you might want to ask yourself before having your website designed?

What are your reasons for having a website?

What do you want to achieve and how will it help you and your business?

Is the sole purpose of your website to increase sales?

If so, in what way?

Will your site need to be geared towards making sales?

Will the majority of your viewers be design conscious people?

Different businesses require different things from a website, some just use it as a front end for their clients to see examples of their work, and others look at it more as a sales tool to increase the income of work to their business and turn viewers into customers. Others may see it as a way just to get word out about their business. Either way whatever your main purpose is for your website design you want to start by knowing what is available to you and what you should expect to pay for.

Are you planning to sell products on your website? Does it need to be an eCommerce website?

An eCommerce website is a site designed specifically to sell a product or service via the internet. This will usually end in the user having to checkout via a payment page giving bank or credit card details in the exchange of goods.

Having an eCommerce website designed can be a tough process due to the site being so technical in nature, you and your designer will need a good line of communication ensuring that you understand what is being produced and that the web designer knows exactly what your requirements are. If you are unfamiliar with eCommerce web design and terminology then a good web designer should normally break down each element of your website in a way that you understand whilst giving you the options that are available to you. An eCommerce business can be very lucrative and with the right optimization and coding can pull in many potential customers to buy your product or service.

Have you considered SEO Search Engine Optimization?

Search engine optimization is a powerful tool to have implemented into your website design and coding. This prepares your website to be found online and makes it as easy as possible to be found by popular search engines such as Google, Yahoo, msn etc. It is important that your website is designed in such a way that any search engine user that is specifically looking for a product or service you provide can find you quickly and easily. If you currently have a website or know someone that does, type into a search engine specific words that are related to what the site is about. If it pops up more often than not on the first or second page then this site has been optimized well. SEO can seriously make or break an online business.

All singing all dancing web design.

If you are looking for an all singing all dancing website then you will need to weigh up whether web optimization is more important than the look of the site itself. Even though all singing all dancing websites look great they are no good if no one is seeing them. When having a website designed consider if you want most of your viewers to be people that are actively looking your business (they may have received your web address from a business card) or people that are searching around. The thing to bear in mind is that the people that want to find your site will.

Some websites that are very well animated are restricted on how much they are recognized by popular search engines. This is mainly because the text content that would normally appear in paragraphs and in the coding of the website may be embedded into graphics and animations. Like I have said before if you are using your website as a showcase for current clients that you may already have then this is fine, but if you are investing in web design that is predominantly aimed at obtaining new customers then this may not be the best choice for you.

Being consistent with your branding when commissioning a Graphic Designer or Web Designer…

Because of the quantity of advertising and sleek looking websites out there today, it is easy to be over inspired and get carried away when it comes to the design of your website. It is very important that when a prospective customer looks at one of your business cards or letter heads that they see and feel a strong consistent presence of your corporate identity and branding. The last thing you want is to have an amazing website that looks nothing like any of your other advertising media. This will make it difficult to be found by those who are looking for your website business directly, making previous advertising ineffective.

Hopefully this article has helped to give you a refined idea of what kind of website design you are looking and enlightened you along the way as to what is available to you. Don’t forget to check out GDIB.co.uk for more info and to find out what we can offer. You never know we could be the key to making your website business a success.

For more Graphic Design related material visit GDIB.co.uk