website design considerations

What about forms

Web site forms are one of the more important facets of your website. They are usually an action step. The point where a customer is inquiring or buying. A good form will be easy to use. It may require that certain fields be filled in. That’s called validation. Most website design companies use a javascript to validate a form. Yet, with about 20% of viewers now having Javascript turned off, we have begun using a form validation scheme that requires no Javascript. We use a web language called PHP to validate. PHP is processed at the web server, not the web browser, so it does not matter how one’s browser is set up.

Will it be an ordering form? If it is an ordering form, will you be using PayPal to process the transaction, or will you be processing the credit card information yourself? Processing the card yourself will require a Certificate of Security from Verisign for about $389 a year, plus often a $50 set up charge from your web host. You will also need a Merchant account from your bank. Using PayPal may be a better solution for smaller companies just starting out with a few products.

Will the form be emailed to you or will you want this in a database or both? We’ll need to know this. Placing a form’s information into a database allows many report options and analytical tools. We will need to know what reports or capabilities you will need. If more than one user or group will be accessing the information, we’ll need to know this to set this up properly.

Will there be any ordering?

As above, we will need to know whether you will be selling items over the website. If so, will there be a need for a shopping cart or will an order form do? What’s the difference? Primarily, a Shopping cart allows you to put something in the cart and go back shopping. An order form just allows you to proceed with Checkout.

If you are looking at less than 25 items, and you feel that the majority of people will just order and buy and not go back to look for other items, an order form may be what you need. It is a lot cheaper than a shopping cart. It will add up the purchase, including shipping, get the billing and shipping information, and of course payment, whether a credit card purchase or through PayPal.

How will the website be maintained

This is a big buzzword in the industry. A lot of website designers push what they call a CMS (Content Management System) onto clients. They often add thousands to a project and may not be needed. It is important that you consider, in real terms, what will need to be changed and how often. In our experience, most websites do not change that much, that often. Keep in mind that we, like many other web site designers can do the maintenance for you. Just e-mail us what you need done, and it is often done in a day or two. We bill to the minute and invoice you monthly. Many smaller companies only require an hour or two PER YEAR of website maintenance. Important to note is whether the website design company you pick has built in X amount of maintenance hours. Will you use them all? What happens if you don’t? Chances are you lose the money.

OK, say your web site requires more maintenance than that. Well, if you are talking about just changing text and or photos on a site, a simple and inexpensive options is to purchase Macromedia’s Contribute software. Very simple to use and at about $150, it is affordable to do most of your own maintenance. More complicated changes can be still done by us. You can also pick up Macromedia’s Dreamweaver application which we use. The ultimate CMS. While many things are fairly easy to do, it may require more training than Contribute, but will allow you to do anything, if you know how to. We can train you for this. What is the difference between Contribute or Dreamweaver and a full CMS? Besides cost, a CMS system allows you to log on securely through your web browser and affect change. This is important if you are on the road a lot or have multiple team members working on the same web site and not in the same office.

Maybe you just need to update a particular thing on a web site frequently, such as rate, or availability. A specialized CMS for this can usually be set up relatively cheaply.

If you are selling products, will the price or photos change frequently? If so, a CMS for that would be a good idea. If it is just once a year, or not often, then a database CMS may not be needed.

How will people find the site

Now that your site is published, all sorts of people will immediately come to the site. Wrong. It takes month to get into the Search Engine databases and more months to start even showing up at all. Depending on how much competition you have, this may be a difficult task to do well on search engine returns. For instance, if your site is about document management, or website design, you have a lot of competition putting a lot of effort into doing well. If you are selling antique door knobs, you may find little competition and it would be far easier to do well. We recommend that new sites invest into a Pay-Per-Click program like Google’s Adwords. Your monthly budget can be as low as $50 a month to maybe hundreds per month. We can help you set up your program and to managing it.

Yet, you should have a SEO (Search Engine Optimization) plan into place. At least twice a year, we should check to see your rankings and to provide recommendations and/or provide adjustments to your site.

Also think about whether your customers are local, regional, national, or worldwide. The smaller the geographical area, the better one can do. AN example would be if you are a financial consultant and only do business in New Hampshire. It is easier to get good results on “financial consultant NH” than just “financial consultant” which would return results from around the country and the World.

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