Part 1: Introduction to Web Design

In the real world, when you open an office to the public, the office has to decorated. On the Internet, this process is called web design. And just like in a real world  business, furniture and decor (web design) are a matter of taste and budget, as well as the image you want to present to the public. On the web, the cost of furnishing (designing) your business will probably be less than the cost of a single advertisement in your local telephone book or a three day run in your local newspaper. 

The cost of web design can varies depending upon many different factors, most importantly what is included in the design, and who is doing the designing.

Most web companies do strict web design. That is, they design - or piece together - a web page for you. Period. End of sentence. End of paragraph. And probably the end of your web business. "But it looked great! How could it have failed?" Hundreds of thousands "cool looking" dot coms have failed miserably because little or no (real) thought went into anything except the looks. And it has been found that how a site looks actually has very little to do with how much money it makes. Some of the plainest, yes... almost ugliest sites out there make some of the most money. 

That is not to say you should intentionally design an ugly site! On the contrary: You should have a very professional looking site - It is YOUR image after all. A well designed successful web site should be quite professional looking while having all the other ingredients necessary for success seamlessly integrated into their professional look.

Before we go into what some of those ingredients are, a word about all the latest technological bells and whistles that many companies over-use on their web sites. That's exactly what they are - bells and whistles - with little or no meaningful content. And just like at the county fair, the more bells and whistles there are in front of the stand, the less chance there is of winning. 

A well designed web site does not need bells and whistles to attract attention. As a matter of fact, the fewer bells and whistles you have on your web site, the more it will get noticed by the search engines - from which 95% of your traffic will originate.

Why? Those bells and whistles take up space on your page! It may be just a cute little doo-dad that spins and pops and takes up less than a square inch when you look at page on a screen, but there may be 2,000 lines of code that drive it. And if you have 200 lines of hard hitting relevant content on that page, it literally gets lost in that 2000 lines of code, and the search engines evaluate your page as having very little relevant content - so you drop down to 139,763,987 in your category. 

"Yeah, but all these other sites have that same little doo-dad." Our philosophy on that statement is "GREAT! "Let them all slug it out to see who's king at the bottom of the heap!" On the other hand, we can stand back and take bets on which web site goes broke the quickest from having to un-necessarily pay all those search engine placement fees to rip off companies that try to compensate for a low position. 

Okay, enough said to get the point. And the point is, be very leery of a company that focuses too much on how you want the site to look. The look of a site should be one of the last things discussed by a design company. The primary points of discussion should all focus on things like the purpose of the site, how that purpose will be accomplished, projected traffic flow within the site, the self marketing abilities of the site, the position-ability of the site, and anything else that will make the site more successful. The look of the site should be discussed only after all the other important aspects of the site are decided upon. And of course it will look professional if you're dealing with a professional web company - this goes without saying. 

And how how do you know if the company you are dealing with is professional enough to make that grand assumption? By them not focusing at all on how the site will look! Once the purpose, and means of accomplishing that purpose have been established, there are four major areas that must be included... integrated... and become one with (and inseparable from) the web design - or how the site will "look". 

Please continue with this article to discover the four most often overlooked - but also the most important aspects of professional web design. Click here.