Website Design

Archive for October, 2007

Finding a good professional website designer is very important to get a good website. Your website design that is created by your website designer is going to represent your business on the worldwide web.Visitors from various part of the world will access your website. A professional web design is the first step towards establishing trust between you and your customers. A good web designer who is capable of creating a good website design can change your company’s image and give a first impression to your website visitors.

Only a few small businesses can afford to have in-house website design skills. Most of the small and medium businesses depend on external website design firms to fulfill their website design needs.

As you start looking for a web designer, it is recommended that you get preliminary specifications for your website needs done. Consider how you want to portray your business to your customer. What image and branding is suitable for your business. What information do you want to convey through your website. Consider if you want to have E-commerce on your website or do you just want to provide information through your website design. Once you have done your preliminary work should undertake the following steps to find a web developer:

Undertake a google search using keywords like website design, website designer, website developer, website development. Speak with other business owners who have good websites and ask for references look in local yellow pages if you want to find a website development firm in your area.

Make preliminary inquiries with a number of web designer or web design agencies: Some steps you can take to pick a website designer or a website developer to create your website.

Check Portfolio:

On short listing some website design firms, you should check their website design portfolio. Look at the creativity in the web design examples that are posted in their web development portfolio. Check if phone and fax numbers are provided. There are a lot of part time website designers and website developers in the market. Although they are capable of doing a good job, but more often than not you will find that the deadlines and product delivery may suffer. Also it is possible that after some time that freelance website developer might move on. Although freelancers are cheap, it is always recommended to go for a professional website design agencies.

Discuss your needs with the selected website designers:

You should set-up a visit or a tele-conference with the selected web designers. Discuss your requirement, initial plan and their recommendations for your website.

Ask for a Proposal:

Once your have finished yourdiscussions, invite 2-3 of the short listed web design firms to send you a website design proposal with their recommendations and prices. To make sure that you are comparing apples with apples, check on the functionality offered by each of the website development firm. More often than not a cheap website proposal will be offering less functionality than a more expensive one. Also make sure that they are capable of developing a user-friendly design. Web usability is equally important as functionality. You should try to establish the agency that offers the best value for money.

Proposal review and order:

Try and evaluate which website designer is offering the best value for money. Who is offering a search engine friendly design? Also try to gage which website developer can offer good customer service. After sales service is equally important. Also make sure that any website programming is covered by a good after sales warranty. It is common for websites to have programming bugs when they go live. There is nothing wrong in them as long as the website development firm fixes those bugs as they are highlighted.

FLASH HQ provides web services (or website solutions) built around any of the above three Content Management Systems. The solution provided is based on the customers requirements to ensure the best website design experience for our customers.

By the end of this week I expect all the trees lining the boulevards here in Fort Collins to be lined by brilliant yellow and gold leafed trees. Yes, fall has arrived and the days with pleasant daytime temperatures and gentle breezes rustling the turning leaves. Do we sleep better when the nights are cooler? I think we do, at least I know I do! I’ve updated the fall design of my website. I’ve been trying to be seasonal with my sites design, don’t ‘cha know. My banner images this fall is a great Colorado classic; The Maroon Bells of the Rocky Mountains with fall aspens at their feet.Did You Know?

Leaves have the same quantity of yellow pigment (xanthophyll) in July when they are green as they do in October when they are yellow. In July the darker green pigment (chlorophyll) masks the yellow color.

Moving Your Tech Life Online

IBM released an online application suite last week in a move to compete with Google. Google has been working tirelessly to provide online applications to compete with Microsoft Office. Their offerings, while not as convenient or powerful, do come close and in fact satisfy the needs of many users. IBM’s online offerings have bested Google in a couple areas and like Google are free. In today’s Wall Stree Journal I read where Microsoft too has rolled out a free service that lets users of its Office software create and share documents over the Internet in new ways. Not to be outdone Adobe, developers of Acrobat Portable Document Format (AKA PDF) have plans to unveil an online document-sharing service called Share.

There are pros and cons to be considered here. Yes there it a great convenience not having those apps installed on ones computer and your data being backed up by the various providers. Equally exciting is the potential to not have to purchase an upgrade to the very expensive Microsoft Office suite. On the downside your ‘editable’ data often remains on the app’s online server – under their control.

• Read more on Google Apps
• Read more on IBM’s Lotus Symphony
• Read more on Office Live
• Read more on Adobe Share

Stop Backing Up!

This is a post I’ve been wanting to write for a while, but the Mozy deal just brought it back to my attention. I’m surprised that all the talk of “the web as the platform” hasn’t led to this already.

Mozy, Carbonite, and others are all great for backing up your hard disk. Ultimately, though, backing up is dead as we move our lives online. In a few short years our documents, spreadsheets, photo albums, music, videos etc will be on the web. We’ll be happily collaborating and sharing on the web.

Knowing this, I can’t understand why all these online storage companies are so focused on providing consumers backup opportunities. There’s no point. If all our documents are online and stored by online file systems, they’ll be backed up automatically. And available. All over the world, from any net-connected computer. That being said you should know yours truly has just completed the Carbonite free trial and now have over thirty gigabytes safely (I hope) stored on their servers.

There’s a level of trust which needs to be obtained of course. But, I generally trust Flickr, Yahoo, Google, Openomy, etc. I know that once my files are stored, they’re safe. They’ll be replicated across many hard drives. Many machines. Many data centers throughout the world.

Mahalo Search

There is a new search engine on the web, Mahalo. I think Mahalo has great results. Especially for non-techies. I asked one of my web pals yesterday whether he’d rather look at the results for Mercedes Benz S-Class at Mahalo or at Google. He instantly wanted Mahalo. Me too.

Mahalo search results are hand generated. I think that is how Yahoo got its start before they went commercial to keep pace with Google?! There’s no question a human touch will help in the area of search results.

Google provides alright results for my example above, it’s just not as pretty and easy to understand as Mahalo. But Mahalo doesn’t provide any useful results for most other sites, while Google does. Sure, Mahalo is trying to use Google here, but their “More results from our friends at Google” thing just doesn’t cut it from the user experience (performance, grouped results, etc).

I think Mahalo can do well. Search is such a large market that even the smallest success is pretty good money. But it won’t be a Google killer, that’s for sure. I don’t know what the answer to this is yet, but it seems likely that an innovative solution in their upcoming platform could help them bridge the search gap and hit their sweet spot.

• Read more on Mahalo