If you need a web designer, but have no clue about the typical web design process, I am quite certain that you must be feeling a bit overwhelmed about what to expect. As web designers, we oftentimes have a myriad of roles to fill when working with their clients, but as the client, you always have a right to know the complete design process up front. Let’s talk a bit about what questions you may want to ask a potential design firm before they get started on your website.

1.) “How much is this going to cost?” Of course you want to know that! Be sure the designer gives you a consultation, which allows you a sneak preview on what they will be able to do for YOU. You want your designer to be personal with you, not general.

2.) Your designer needs to know the general PURPOSE of your site. What is your main goal? Who is your audience? Will there be interactivity, collaboration, or e-commerce on your website? You should ask the designer if he or she has the capabilities of designing a site that would suit your purpose and mission.

3.) Ask for a contract to review. Take a few days to look over the contract before signing.

4.) Does the designer ask you what YOU like? Your designer should ask you about your favorite colors on the web, what websites you do or don’t like, and why. Also they should make sure they discuss with you any features that you find unappealing and take note of your opinions.

5.) Who will own the copyrights to the finished product? Make sure you find out whether or not your designer takes full copyrights of the website. Many times designers will also want to use your website designs as part of their portfolio. They should let you know this in advance.

6.) Will your designer also host your site? Make sure you find out how your site will be published and which company will provide your hosting services. How often will you need to make hosting payments and when? Who will secure your domain name, and does this come with hosting?

These are all questions to consider when working with a web designer. As you become familiar with the person you are working with, it will become easier to detect his or her style, and be able to communicate effectively with them. As a designer, I can tell you that we wear many different hats and work with many different people on a daily basisbut as the client you will ALWAYS have a right to ask questions and expect reasonable answers. In your search for a trustworthy web designer, be sure to ask the questions above, and I’m certain you’ll locate the designer with the right answers for you.

Demetria Zinga is the founder and owner of http://www.faith-media.com, a technology and consulting firm which specializes in web design and hosting, graphics and print designs, internet marketing, and e-training. She is also the founder of http://www.christianladies.net, an interactive ezine, blog, and podcast for Christian women.

Creating a well-designed website is the first step in your internet marketing strategy. Once the website has been created and optimized, there are further techniques to employ that will drive traffic to your website for successful, long-term results. You wouldn’t consider opening a retail store in a major shopping mall without signage and you shouldn’t consider having a nice looking website designed without expanding your web presence in order to be found on the internet. But unless the website is designed correctly to begin with, follow-on SEO efforts will have limited results at best. The following strategy overview is designed to bring about productive SEO results:

- Create an attractive website that is complementary to your company image and provides your targeted audience with information about you, your company and your products and/or services.

- Design a website that has a call-to-action in the form of a purchase or providing you a contact, subscription or other commitment from your visitor.

- Create a successful marketing arm for your overall business promotion and marketing campaign to promote your business, products and/or services with the many follow-on strategies that drive traffic to your website.

- Become competitive in your industry and marketplace by meeting or exceeding the industry marketing standards and attracting a qualified audience for your products and/or services based on a strong reputation.

- Generate and maintain or grow internet traffic to your website resulting in a conversion of traffic into sales of your products and/or services by evolving as your market demands.

This search engine optimization (SEO) strategy is composed of several processes in three stages: 1) Good web design, 2) Attracting attention from search engines and directories, and 3) Creating long-term popularity on the internet. However, it all starts with good web design. Website design is the foundation and beginning of a successful internet marketing strategy. It is true that there are websites on the internet that are unattractive but somehow seem to work. If there are aspects of these websites that work, imagine how well they could do if they simply followed basic design implementation tactics that resulted in a good image as well as simply pushed information out to the viewer.

These basics are essential for Tier 1 success:

- Good web design will complement and enhance the company image and offline marketing campaign products creating a corporate branding if done well.

- Easy, logical navigation that leads the viewer deeper and deeper into the web of information provided by the website will keep the visitor on your site longer and give you more time to sell your products or services.

- Attractive but quick-loading graphics that are pleasing to the eye and meaningful to the website will guide the viewer along the route you decide is important for explaining what you offer.

- Keyword usage that is search engine-friendly depends on how the keywords are utilized, the placement of the keywords, the frequency of the most important keywords and their relevance to the website.

- Website coding that is lean, clean and without errors will keep the search engines happy and your viewer seeing exactly what you intended to offer.

- Relevance of content to the theme of the site is essential. Be concise, to the point and focus on your goals. If you have multiple themes and offerings, consider multiple websites to address the different markets, then tie each website back to the others by linking.

- Changing content that changes frequently and stays fresh keeps your viewer returning and prevents the search engines from treating your website as if it were stale news. A stale site will be ranked lower by the search engines.

Content is king — it’s all about content, content, content. But how that content is presented is what makes the difference.

(c)2005 TAO Consultants, Inc. All rights reserved.

Chesa Keane of TAO Consultants has been involved with the internet for 10 years
through internet consulting, web development and search engine optimization. Go to
http://www.computergoddess.com for a free Search Engine Optimization Checklist.

Tips to brand your website

• Include your logo in all pages. Position it at the top left or each page.

• Complement your logo with a tagline or catchy sentence that summarizes your business purpose. For example “Always low prices” is the tagline for Wal-Mart.

• Create a favicon. A favicon is that small graphic that appears next to the URL in the address bar.

• Have a consistent look and feel in all your pages. Use a color scheme and layout that are clearly recognized across your site.

• Have an About Us section, that includes all relevant information about you and your business.

• Include a copyright statement at the bottom of each page.

Tips on website navigation

• Design your pages to load in less than 10 seconds (50Kb maximum size, including pictures).

• Group your navigational options in relevant categories.

• Use common names for your menu options: Home, About Us, Contact Us, Help, Products. Avoid “clever” or “trendy” alternatives.

• If your site uses Flash, provide also an HTML version for users who prefer a less fancy, faster site.

• Provide simple text navigation links at the bottom of long pages, so users don’t need to scroll back up.

• Link your logo to your homepage, except in the homepage itself. Put a link to your homepage on all your internal pages.

• Display a “breadcrumb trail”; it is basically the path from the homepage to the page where you are. A breadcrumb trail looks like this: Home > Section > Sub-Section > Page, and it greatly facilitates navigation.

• If your site is too big, provide Search capabilities. Include a search box in the upper right corner of your homepage, and a link to a Search page from your interior pages. Freefind ( ) offers you a free and powerful search engine for your site.

• Set your search box to search your site, not to search the web.

• Create a custom error page that displays a simple site map with links to the main sections of your site. That way, you will not lose visitors that have followed a bad link to your site or who have misspelled your URL.

Tips on Layout and Content Presentation

• Save the top of your page for your most important content. Remember: good content must flow to the top.

• Lay out your page with tables, and set the width in percentage terms instead of a fixed number of pixels. That way, your page will always fit the screen, without the need to scroll horizontally.

• Optimize your page to be viewed best at 800×600 (the most popular resolution at the time of this writing).

• Use high contrast for the body of your page: black text on white background, or white text on black background work best.

• Don’t use too many different fonts in one page. Also, avoid using small serif fonts (like Times Roman): they are difficult to read from a computer screen. Verdana is the most web-friendly font, since it is wide, clean and easy to read.

• Avoid long blocks of text. Use tools that facilitate scanability, like bullets, subtitles, highlighted keywords, hyperlinks, etc.

• Avoid amateurish features like: numeric page counters, wholesale use of exclamation points, all caps, center justified blocks of text, excessive animated gifs, busy backgrounds, etc.

• Don’t use pop-up windows. They distract your visitors and are immediately dismissed as ads.

• Test your site so that it looks good in different browsers and resolutions.

Tips on Writing for the Web

• Write in layman’s terms so that everybody can understand your content, unless you’re running a technical site for technical people.

• Reading from a screen is painful: use 50% less words than you would use on print.

• If a page is too long, break it into several pages and link to them.

• Don’t use font sizes smaller than 10pt. for the body of your page. Specify your fonts in percentage terms instead of pixels, to let users set their own size preferences using their browser’s text view options.

• Use a spell checker. Spelling mistakes are embarrassing and hurt credibility.

Tips to Know Your Customers

• Ask for feedback: include a feedback form in your Contact Us page.

• Publish an ezine and include a subscription form in your homepage. Give your customers valuable information and encourage them to contact you.

• Include polls and other tools to gather market intelligence.

Tips on Linking

• Make your links descriptive. They should indicate what the user will be linking to, as opposed to just saying “click here”.

• Don’t underline anything that is not a link.

• Underline your links and use a consistent color for them across your site (preferably blue).

• Use a different color for visited links, so that your visitors know where they’ve been (preferably purple or a more subdued tone of the unvisited links color).

• When linking to a non-HTML file, such as Excel, Word or Acrobat, make it evident, by including a small icon next to the link.

• Don’t link to “under construction” pages.

• Make sure that your links work and that you don’t have broken links. There are free online tools that can help you with this.

• If you use graphic links, don’t forget to use the ALT attribute. The ALT attribute should describe what are you linking to.

Tips on how to use graphics

• Optimize your graphics. Use only .gif and .jpg formats. Make your image files as small as possible while maintaining acceptable quality. Use a free online graphics optimization tool.

• Use thumbnails (miniature versions of a picture) and make them clickable to the actual size picture.

• Avoid graphics that look like ads. People ignore them.

• Use the ALT attribute on pictures, even the image is not a link. It helps users with disabilities and people who have turned off graphics.

Tips to optimize your site for the search engines:

• Create short, descriptive page titles, to entice search engine users to click on your links.

• Create a site map containing all your pages, and link to it directly from your homepage. Search engine robots will follow the link to your site map and will most likely add all your pages to the index.

• Decide what the two or three main keywords are for each page (the words you believe search engine users will type to find your page) and repeat them often in your page title, description meta tag and page body.

• Create a Links page and call it Resources. In it, place links to those sites that have agreed to place a reciprocal link to your page. The more inbound links you have from quality sites with a topic related to your site, the better your site will rank with the search engines.

• Use more text than graphics, and minimize the use of Flash and JavaScript. Search engines heavily favor text and will crawl and index your site faster.

For more details on these tips, or for more tips, visit http://www.theinternetdigest.net .

About The Author

Mario Sanchez publishes The Internet Digest ( http://www.theinternetdigest.net ), a collection of web design and Internet marketing tips and resources to help you design a better website and market it more effectively.