Designing Your Website

You’ve decided you want us to design your website – great! How do we start the process? The first thing we will look at is your company’s current “look,” since you will most likely want your website to be similar to your other marketing tools in appearance. For instance, we will incorporate your company logo and colors into the website design.

We will meet with you to determine the content for your website and how you want to lay out the information. You can either provide the overall design, or we can design the site for you. In general, we can work with your ideas within the natural limitations of a website, so some changes may need to be made, although we will keep as close to your original vision as possible. If you want us to design a custom site lay out for you, we will provide some concepts for your review and work with you to achieve an overall style that you are pleased with. You will provide most of the actual content, such as logos, photographs and ad copy while we will design the overall look and design and determine where each element will be placed in the layout.

We will always keep in contact with you and update you on the progress so that you can review the work periodically. When we begin the work, we will determine what type of website you need. Most websites are either brochure style or database style.

A brochure website resembles a hard copy brochure because it contains content that doesn’t change. Each time you visit the site, you will see the same information, and all visitors will see what each other visitor does. This is the most common kind of website, and can provide plenty of information because you can add as many pages as you want at any time.

A database website is more complex. It will contain some material that is brochure style (that is, it will remain constant), but parts of the website will actually be backed by a database of information that can change according to the instructions of the visitor. For example, a visitor can use a drop-down menu to select certain products to look at or certain articles to read. This material is not actually on the website, but located in a separate database. When a visitor makes a selection, the information is pulled from the database and displayed on the screen.

The reason the website and database are at two separate locations is simple – ease of use. If you will be changing the database frequently to change prices, update information or add new contacts, it is easier to change just that information and leave the website’s look as is. Think of the overall website’s look as the “frame,” and the database as the “picture.” On your website, the frame will always be the same, but visitors can pull a variety of different pictures into that frame to view them. This “custom service” for visitors is an excellent marketing tool and can provide current, accurate material with relatively little change to the site itself.

On the website we will design a CMS (Content Management System) that you can use to go to the database and, with the appropriate password, go in and change the content as often as needed. You do not have to be a programmer or computer expert to do this, because we will set it up with simple admin instructions and choices so that you can manage this area (sometimes called the “back end” of the site) yourself.

Most websites today are constructed using HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) or CCS (Cascading Style Sheets), the two most common systems. Both of these can create creative, stylish websites that will reflect your company’s image. We will select the programming language that we feel will work best for you and provide the most effective website design. When designing the database section of a website, we can use technologies like VBScript (Visual Basic) to make the management of this information easier for you.

As we work with you to design and construct your website, we will answer any questions you may have and explain the processes along the way. Our goal is to design a website that is effective, attractive and efficient while reflecting your company’s goals.