Getting a Web Site On A Budget

Back in the early days of the Internet, the ability to code HTML and create a beautiful website was a highly respected and well-paid new career. That's before enterprising people from all walks of life figured out that if you have a reasonably good grasp of design and balance, it's not too hard to learn how to put together a web page. Later, Netscape Gold and Microsoft Frontpage came out, enabling anyone with layout or word processing skills to put together web sites quickly and easily.

Today, though many challenging processes have been introduced into the world of web site creation, web design itself is more of an art than a programming task. In general, it's better to hire a web designer, not a programmer, to create a website; it's cheaper, and making web sites look great is not what programmers do.

But having great design skills doesn't cover everything you need to have from your website. A web site that no one sees isn't worth anything. You want your web site to be visited. It should rank well in the search engines. It should be well-written, and your designer should know enough about how web marketing works to give you advice about other things you can do to enhance your customer traffic and customer retention.

What To Look For In A Designer

The number one criterion for a web designer should be a proven ability to get pages ranked high on the search engines; this means the designer should have live web sites out there that you can look at. Secondary to this criterion, the web sites you're looking at should look good and read well.

Since web design is a skill learned hands-on rather than through expensive college degrees, there's lots of competition between designers for customers. This works in your favor. You should never pay more than a few hundred pounds for a basic web site of four or five pages.

What About Web Design Templates?

They seem like the ultimate way to save money: invest in hosting with this company, and you'll have access to their templates. You'll be able to build your whole website yourself, from start to finish, with your own content. And you only pay a pittance.

But in this as in many things, you get what you pay for. These templates save you money, but you don't get advantages like:

• A professionally-designed unique site
• Search-engine optimization and web-optimized content
• Advice on marketing and ways to keep customers coming back
• Well-written content your customers will love
• An ongoing relationship with a professional who keeps up with what's going on in the fast-changing world of the Internet

With do-it-yourself sites, your site looks like all the other sites put together by the template. The content writing is no better nor worse than what you normally expect of yourself, but you will lack the optimization that can get you great search engine rankings. Ultimately, you should look at using a professional web designer as an advertising investment, just as you would a newspaper or radio spot.

One last thing: when you hire a designer, always stipulate in your contract that you own the copyright to your site. And get a disk with the site copied to it; back this disk up so you have more than one copy. This protects your ownership of the site so that if you ever have to use a different designer, you have all your original work in your hands.

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Mark Lawson is the webmaster for http://www.discountdomainsuk.com a leading
UK Web Design Service Please feel free to republish this article
together with working hyperlinks.
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