These are some tips from me to you designed to aid preparation and maximize your planning and budget. If you're considering hiring a designer or producer for media projects, it's beneficial for both parties to have some communication and content guidelines. This article tackles some common issues Hope this information is useful to you and please Contact Me if you have further questions.
A good place to start is to figure out is what you want your website to be. This may seem like it goes without saying, but it's beneficial to put some thought into specific goals or a vision of what your ideal website would be. Identify any important features and information that you need to have on your website and build on that. You don't need to have it planned out completely, but the more specific you can get, the faster it can come together.
If you're short on inspiration: surf the web, bookmark websites that you like, take a look at your competitors websites to see what style of site they have. Brainstorm ideas, try writing catch phrases or tag lines that describe your message or vision. I'm happy to collaborate with my clients about their ideas and offer feedback.
Having a website has some technical requirements that need to be met before your website can exist on the internet. See my Start Up Requirements page for more details about what you need. Once these issues are dealt with, your site can be live on the internet. I'm always here to help my clients with this process.
The term content is used to describe any material that appears on your website. Text, Pictures, Videos ECT. All of this will need to be given to me in order to put it on the internet, and the better the quality and organization of the material, the faster your site can be completed. If you can provide source files (documents, links ECT) for existing content it speeds things up quite a bit. For example, it only takes a second to copy and paste text from a word document or email, but it takes a lot longer to re-type a photocopy of your content.
If you have a logo or pre-made graphics, providing Photoshop, Illustrator or similar files is better than a JPEG or other image files. This also goes for any promotional materials, flyers, posters, brochures or business cards that you may wish to integrate into your site. If these images need to be re-sized or edited in any way - it's a snap with the source files. But without them, the process can be very time consuming and the quality of the final product may be degraded, especially if your images are low resolution.
It's also important to have an idea of what your content is before hand, as the length of your text, the size of your graphics and the amount of content you have play a part in the design. The design should highlight the content, but the content should be the star of the website.
For most sites, it's best to try and achieve a balance in your content between images, media and text. Text is what you're reading now, you can copy and paste it, but more importantly it's what shows up in search engines. Plus, any web browser can read it - even simple cell phone browsers that don't display graphics. If you have a ton of images but not much text, some users may not be able to see them and may miss the point of your website. It's best to pair images with corresponding text to add visual flair to your content.
Of course, the type of website you have will determine the type of content you use. For example, if you're a photographer, you will obviously need to have a photo gallery with a ton of images, but you'll also need to describe your services somewhere so people know what you do and how to contact you to book a photo shoot. If you're selling items online, you'll need to have product pictures and descriptions. The more balanced your content is, the better you can communicate your overall message.
Once you've identified the materials for your website, it's time to start thinking about where this information will be displayed on your site. The most common way to organize materials is through the pages on your website. For example, your business may have a services page where you describe an overview of what your business does. That page may have several more pages linked to it where you describe individual services in more detail. It's all about what information you need to convey. If you just have a basic site, then keeping things as simple as possible is the way to go. The more pages you have, the more content you will need to fill those pages.
Your home page is the first page your site visitors will see. Decisions about what goes on the home page are very important. A good approach is to think of the home page as an overview of your entire site. You can highlight the important features of your site and link to those pages using small chunks of text or graphics. The most important items should be featured at the top, to make sure they are visible immediately when visiting your site. It should be very easy for your visitors to find what they are looking for quickly. If not, they will most likely move on to another site.
What do you want your site to look like? Do you have company colors, or a specific style of design in mind? It helps if you do. Color schemes and graphic styles determine what your site will look like. You may only have a few colors or images you want to use or have a very specific look in mind. Either way, I can work with your basic ideas or implement an exact design concept.
This is what your website does. Do you need a store, or message board, or a comment system? How do you need to interact with your website visitors? You may just need an email address or a contact form, or you may want to have a photo gallery that visitors can comment on, or have complex user interactions or social networking applications. The sky is the limit, it's best to focus on what you need and accomplish that goal first. There is always room to add on in the future if your needs change.
These are just a few things you can consider before diving into the process of having a website. If need some help with these concepts, don't hesitate to ask - I'm here to help.