by Artisan | Website Design Journal
First of all, it is not free. The free trial is limited in functions and designed to make you want to pay the fee and get more tools. The cost is similar to a shared hosting service. Weebly, Squarespace, Wix, they are hosting companies. The difference between them and other hosting companies is that customers must use a website builder tool to build websites. Godaddy has a website builder too while also offering shared and dedicated hosting alternatives. Eventually, more hosting companies will provide website builders.
Here is a chart comparing the features of the top six companies:
Review Chart on Website Builder Hosts
Not all templates on website builders are fully compatible with mobile devices, and I find that the choices for templates are usually limited, and these themes have limited features too. There is a good chance that many other websites look a lot like yours. You will often get halfway into designing a website to find that a design feature that you wanted doesn’t exist in that template, and there isn’t much you can do about it. If you ever want to move your website from one of these site building hosts to another hosting company, it is not going to be as easy as it would if you had built your website with your own customer WordPress installation and a top of the line theme.
The real question is this? Do you want to build your website yourself, or hire someone else to help you?
You can also hire a website designer with experience in marketing design, information presentation and copy writing to build a better website for you than you could alone. A good designer doesn’t need a builder tool. He/she will have his own custom collection of tools and his own set of standards for how a website should behave. A good website designer can offer you many features that you won’t be offered on a builder tool and help you with photography and copy writing and overall presentation.
If you are a business, you must have a website. Websites are the primary form of advertisement on planet Earth in 2016. It should be important to you that your website is as good or better than your competitors. It will make a difference. It is hard to achieve the quality you deserve if you have no experience building websites. The way the information is presented is important. Can you write marketing copy well? Can you make interesting graphic representations of your information? Do you know what people expect to see on a website?
If you can reach your goals on your own, that’s good. If you want help, hire a website designer who can write market copy and design information and knows the rest of the online marketing world, and work together. You will get a better product with better ideas and land more customers.
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by Artisan | Website Design Journal
Imagine you have become enlightened. You know that one of the top 3 most important platforms of advertising you could possibly add to your business is a state of the art, professionally designed website. The first website you had was thrown together by a friend or relative for free, but you know this will no longer be enough. You have matured and so have your business objectives. You are ready and willing to pay professional rates to a professional designer for professional results, but you still don’t want to pay top dollar. You want to keep the cost down as much as possible, while not sacrificing quality and effectiveness. Realize that nothing comes of nothing and that to save money, you have to save the designer some effort and time by doing some of the work for him. You just have to determine which components of that work you have the skills and the time to complete. This article should help you move in that direction.
Photography & Graphics
.We can schedule a time when all your employees are dressed nicely and on site. I can travel to your office and take photos of everyone, then return and crop them for upload, and you can pay me for all that time. Or you can tell all your staff that you need portrait photos by the end of the week and that the world is going to know what you look like, so make them professional.
If you have many products, or even a few products, you probably already have photography for those products. Find the original JPG files of all those photos and get them ready to send to your web designer. If you do not like the photos you have, maybe you could take new photos with your phone camera and send those. The most important rules for achieving excellent product photos is as follows:
- Set up a clean and intentional background
- Get close, include the entire item with a little room at the edges
- Set up bright lighting, or do it outside in the sunlight.
- Hold the camera very still, and take several shots.
If you follow these rules with any photos you take, I bet you 10 dollars you will succeed.
You might also have some kind of concept you need to convey using more than words, using a diagram or a chart or some kind of illustration. It is important that this graphic clearly respresents the information and has a professional look. AquaJazz can clean up these graphics for you, but if you take the time to clearly sketch some idea of how you wish to represent the information, this will save you money during the web design process.
If you want some kind of big, attractive slide show on the home page, this will require big, attractive photographs. To save you a lot of money, you should find those photos in your own collection, or ask someone you know who is good at photography to provide them for you. The alternative is that AquaJazz will spent several hours searching through large online collections for ideal candidates, then ask you to pay anywhere from $50 to $100 each to buy the rights to use them on your website. Again, I can stage and produce custom photos for you, but if you find them yourself, you will save lots of money. Web designers do not have a magical source for beautiful free photos. Free photos are usually free because they are not attractive.
Verbal Content | Market Copy | Sales Pitch
Perhaps you have a print brochure containing some literature. Start there. You might also have some literature from the wholesalers of your products. Gather that. Perhaps you recently wrote a powerful sales letter to a prospective client, and that letter sold them on your services. That letter could have valuable material for a page of the website. Include that in the material that you hand to your web designer.
Do you truly have a clear and organized description of your services, written by someone who can write well? If not, this is the time you need one. Be sure that the literature you want to put on your website contains the terminology relevant to your business and your customers. The words in your website are what search engines use to find you. Graphics make your website beautiful. Words do the marketing. Without words, you are an invisible hot dog stand in cyberspace with a missing objective.
Technical Details
Every website has a domain and a hosting plan. The domain may have been purchased at the hosting company, but the hosting company might be the wrong kind of hosting company to upgrade your website. In that case, we have to move you elsewhere. It takes time to extract your domain from a registrar to move it elsewhere. Sometimes all we need to do is change the DNS number of the domain at the registrar to point to a new hosting company. Allow time for this. There are many shabby, overpriced hosting companies. Some are not even hosting companies, but brokers taking your money for doing nothing. If you are on one, I will move you before I build a new website.
To determine all these details, and to get you set up, you will need to send the web designer your usernames and passwords to all related accounts. I have to enter those accounts to build the website.
Draft an Outline
Go find a website built by a competitor to your business, or something similar. Make sure that you actually believe that the website is well designed. Examine what they did. Take notes. Gather ideas. Pay attention to what pages they have. What is on those pages. Why? Are they useful pages? Do you want those pages on your website? Make a list of the pages you think you need and what should be on them. Write it all down.
Delivery
Make sure all this material is in stored in the form of computer files. Now, attached it all to several emails and send it to me. If you have done a good job, my job will proceed smoothly and you will get a truly professional website for a reasonable price, and it will get completed quickly.
So there you go, Portland Oregon. If you want to save money, be prepared. I will help you with all these things any time you like, but there is a lot you can do too.
by Artisan | Website Design Journal
What are the top 9 general features you should demand of your website design?
Features in Every AquaJazz Website Design
- User Friendly, Feature Rich, WordPress Management Dashboard
- Owner Controlled Domain & Hosting on a Light Budget
- Top of the Line Hosting Platform & Well Tested Plugin Software
- Cutting Edge Design, Fashion, Color Schemes and Layout Tools
- Strong Hacker Protection with Intruder and Update Email Alerts
- Compatibility with All Browsers, Mobile Devices and Tablets
- Visitor Traffic Monitoring, Reporting & Diagnostic Tools
- Interface for Writing and Publishing Journal or Blog Articles
- Configured for Optimal Search Results in Your Field & Region
As your website designer, my first priority is to learn your business and tailor the features and the interface to enhance your business success.
by Artisan | Website Design Journal
What are the dangers to your website in 2015?
Here is what can happen. Robotic password finders attempt to log into your website by pounding on it until they decode your password. Malicious code can be injected into a plugin or page that redirects users to other websites like pornography. You might not even know that you clicked a link in an email that put a trojan virus on your computer that has stolen all your passwords and personal information, then they break into your accounts and do damage. This last one is very bad and would require extensive repair that I can’t even get into right now. Don’t click on links from strange emails without consulting the source first. The other two can be prevented most of the time by proper website assembly. This is why you need to hire a professional website designer.
AquaJazz equips websites with protection from hackers,
Security monitor and firewall plugins can protect you from most invasions, or at the very least, alert you when they happen and provide a fairly quick clean up solution. You need a good password, and you need to change it to a new one at least every few months or even more often. If you have the kind of website that might be a frequent target, we have to install very high security plugins and set them to maximum protection. This sometimes involves a fee to the plugin developer. Some of the free plugins are enough for most websites, and these plugins are quite sophisticated and only available to websites built with a CMS like WordPress. If you have a hand coded website, it probably won’t pass the test on a tablet or smart phone, but worse, it is probably going to be very vulnerable to hackers.
If you are invaded, and the damage is extensive
The best repair strategy is to revert to a version or copy of the website that existed before the hack. You can only do this if you have been backing up the website regularly. This can be an automatic task scheduled and executed at the hosting panel, or facilitated with a plugin that sends you copies that you save on your computer. Now you know, but keeping track and making it happen is what your website designer should do for you.
by Artisan | Website Design Journal
At the first moment of contact with a client, the client usually asks me the same question: “How much is this going to cost to have you build my website?” I always have to answer them with a question: “What do you want your website to do for you?” Often, they are not clear on the answer. So then, I have to probe deeper. But before I can ask another question, I often describe all the things a website can do for them. Sometimes they want a website that is much more robust than they realize. Sometimes, it is just a fancy brochure. Sometimes they have created a lot of the content for the website already. Other times I am expected to do all the work for them. In this article, I hope to at least educate my clients and readers about some general uses applied to websites with a list that covers the most common goals. Here is the list and some definitions.
1. Brochure
Brochure websites typically require a Home page that is a simple introduction with nice graphics and a choice or two of where to click next. The next page might be a description of the Services you provide, or the products you create. Then next page might be a Profile of the owner or the staff in your company and their credentials. The next page might be Pricing & Procedures, outlining how much you cost to hire and what the client should do next to engage you. The final important page is Contact, where you provide your location, mailing address, a Form for sending messages, maybe directions to your office, and a phone number.
2. Magazine
On the Internet (the Web) a Magazine is basically just a Blog. a Blog is a series of articles arranged in chronological order, which is the same as a magazine. A Blog system is built into every WordPress installation. If you want a Blog, write some articles and gathere some images for each article before calling me. I will install the articles and activate the Blog system, which will fill the Blog and show us what the magazine will look like. In addition to the magazine, you will still need other Pages similar to on a Brochure website.
3. Ecommerce or Shopping Cart
Again, you will probably start with Pages similar to a Brochure, but the Home page is going to look like an online Store, with products listed and available to place into a Cart, then purchase right there online with a credit card or PayPal account. Shopping Cart systems require more setup and a lot of configuration. To build one requires a lot more time and effort for both the website designer and the client. See my Portfolio for an example of an ECommerce website.
4. Classes, Events, Performance Calendars
Again, begin with a Brochure. Then we can add to that the type of Calendar tools you need. Perhaps you need clients to be able to sign up for an event. That would be more work than just a Calendar of events. Sometimes it involves a purchase too, which can be handled in a simple or not so simple way. Let your website designer know that you need these features before expecting an evaluation of the scope of the work and costs. Will the designer be entering a large number of events for you, or are you going to do that maintenance work yourself? Will you need training to know how? Training is another element.
Dashboard Training
Unless you want your website designer to become a member of your part time company staff, then someone at your company will need to be trained to use the WordPress Dashboard and tools we have installed to run your business. The more tools you have, the more training you will need. This will also affect your estimated cost for website development. Can we train you on the phone, in person, or will you be asking for documentation? These tasks are all different in cost as well.
Conclusion
There are several more possibilities, but this covers the common elements and gives you an idea of how to get prepared. Hopefully this short essay will help you get prepared for making our first conversation productive. Before I can write a proposal and offer a quote or estimate for website design, I need to see all the materials you have gathered and planned to submit for inclusion on the website. The more material you have carefully organized and gathered and sent to me, the less expensive the website will be to price out, and to build.
by Artisan | Website Design Journal
I have a client in Maine who provides tutoring services to student writers. There are many writing tutors in Maine. When new client prospects call, she has to sell them on why she is a better tutor than her competition. This is difficult to do on the phone. She offers references, lists her credentials, and tries to be good natured, but so do all her competitors, many of whom have equally impressive credentials. The other day, she told me “Every client who sees my website hires me.” They love what they see. It is a better website than her competitors. It conveys a positive attitude. It is very well organized. It answers all their questions. It offers Post articles from which the client can begin to learn immediately. Like it or not, believe it or not, these days, every new client will check out your website and that might be their first big impression of you and your service or product. They might even check it out initially on their tablet or phone. You can’t afford to fool around with amateur productions any more. If you do not have a state of the art website, there is a very good chance you are losing customers as we speak. Why would you do that?
Advertising is essential to success, and the most potent and common and important form of advertising in the year 2015 is your website. Yes, doing it right costs money. But when you buy tools to make your product the best it can be, then purchase bad quality advertising, you are not taking your effort or your business seriously. Website Marketing is just as important as the product. If you have ever taken a class or a seminar teaching you how to be a salesperson, you know that the most important moment in sales is “closing the deal.” The customers is looking for the right amount of information. When they have that, then they wait for you to suggest their next move, which should be to make an appointment. Your website design should be an organized tour through the most important information, decorated with excellent photography that gives the customer a good feeling, then it should offer them the next step and a way to take that step.
by Mark Saintonge of Portland Oregon
