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Web Design Buyer’s Guide: comparing web design quotes

admin — Tue, 31 Mar 2009 07:13:43 +0000

Once you get a list of web design quotes, choosing the best quote is easy if you understand what you want. If you want a simple informational website, perhaps with basic e-commerce and no tricky interactive features, you should look for a web site design company that specialises in small business website packages.

If you want a web site that addresses complicated business problems, connects to your existing databases or customer service systems, or offers e-commerce that's more than point, click, and buy, you will want to find a website design company who work with your business as a consultant.

There are many aspects of a web design project. When asking for and comparing web design quotes, it is best to be specific about what you want. This way, there are no surprise costs half-way through the project.

A web design quote might address any of the following:

Billing and Payments
Blogs
Booking Systems (Rooms, appointments etc)
Donations
Dynamic Photo Galleries
eCommerce
Forums
Help Desk / Bug Reporting
Interactive Map
Member/User Management
Newsletter Subscriptions
Polls
Ratings and Reviews
Social Networking Profiles
Video Player
Website Monitoring and Analytics
Interface Design
Form Design
Database Design
Web Hosting
Domain Names

The first step in choosing a web site design company is conducting a phone interview. Here are some questions to ask. (If you're looking for a freelancer, almost all of these still apply.)

What are your strengths as a site development company?
Do you understand my business and customers? (It's not the end of the world if they're unfamiliar with your industry, but they should be eager to learn.)
Do you handle design, development, hosting, and e-commerce? (Ask only about those you're interested in, of course.)
Will you do the work, or outsource it to others?
Can you help us with content creation or ideas?
Will you test the site in various browsers? Which? (A site that works fine in one browser may break in another.)
Can your developers connect the site to our customer database/inventory tracking software/sales software?
Will we be able to update the site content ourselves?
Do you do site hosting? What kind of guarantees do you offer?
How long have you been in business? Can you provide some sample sites for me to look at? (Be wary if you may hear the answer that "most of the sites we've worked on are intranets, not available to the public." Any company deserving of your business should have at least a few sites to show you.)
What kind of support do you offer if our site breaks or needs emergency updates?

In addition to looking at sample web sites, you should also check a design company's references. Talking to their other clients can give you the good picture of what it's like to work with a particular web site design company. Get at least three, and ask them specific questions:

Did the firm meet deadlines?
Were they flexible?
What aspects of their work were particularly strong?
What areas were not quite up to your expectations?
Did they help you plan and organize the web site?
Did they set and meet realistic goals for your company?
Would you work with this company again?

Armed with the right questions not only will you get the information you need when evaluating design quotes, you will also appear savvy which will mean the designers will respect you. Mutual respect and with lots of communication will lead to good prices and smooth projects.

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Different Types of Websites Explained

admin — Wed, 11 Mar 2009 09:07:31 +0000

When working with web designers it is easy to get lost in all the jargon. For example:

Designer: "Would you like your quotation to include an CMS quote or do you want XHTML compatibility?"

Customer: "Umm... yes?"

The more you know about what you want, the better the end product is going to be and the better deal you are going to get. So let's have a look at the six major types of websites and their typical features.

1. Static Website

Pros: Cheap to build

Cons: Expensive to maintain

Used by: Start ups and small service based businesses

A static website is the most common website for small businesses. The word 'static' refers to way the information on a web page is loaded. The best way to explain this is to compare a 'static' photo gallery with a 'dynamic' photo gallery.

A static photo gallery has the gallery photos inserted into the web page. Click to see an example of a static photo gallery. When the website owner wants to add photos to this gallery, they will need to employ the skills of a web programmer because the photos are part of the code. They are loaded from inside the web page.

A dynamic photo gallery has it's photos stored in a database and loads the files from the database and into the web page. Click to see an example of a dynamic photo gallery. When the website owner wants to add photos to this gallery, all they need to do is upload the photos to the database using a web interface. This makes updating the gallery much easier.

Example Static Websites:

http://www.melbournedailoong.com.au/

Get static website quotes at Design Quotes

2. eCommerce Website

Pros: Sell products online and take payments online

Cons: Time consuming and expensive to set up

Used by: Retailers

eCommerce has quickly become the most popular type of website. With the wild success of eBay and Amazon, more and more businesses are looking for ways to sell their products online. The main factors that make a website an eCommerce website is not just that it sells products, but that it provides a special administrator's area where the website owner can add new products at any time. Much like the dynamic photo gallery, an eCommerce website is a dynamic product gallery.

Example eCommerce Websites:

Get eCommerce quotes at Design Quotes

3. Flash Website

Pros: Looks fantastic

Cons: Slow load times and can negatively affect search engine rankings

Used by: Fashion industry, web application, web games

Flash websites use a special kind of graphics by Adobe. Flash allows designers to be very creative without worrying about the limitations of technology. Flash allows for lots of animation and interactive elements. Fashion catalogues often use Flash so that there is an added level of glitz. One of the main criticisms of using Flash is that the text in your website cannot easily be read by search engines such as Google. This means that a flash website is much less likely to rank highly in search results.

Example Flash Websites:

Get Flash website quotes at Design Quotes

4. Content Management System Website

Pros: Article and news management

Cons: Difficult to set up, often hard to learn to use

Used by: News portals, article websites, review websites

A Content Managment System (CMS) is a website which focuses on the authoring, editing and publishing of website articles and news. The articles in a CMS are stored in a database and are displayed in the website the same way photos from a dynamic photo gallery are. The advantage is that a CMS can allow many users (editors, authors, admins etc) to update the websites content through the website itself. This means that a web programmer does not need to be employed every time an article is added. Another feature of many CMS platforms is plugins. Plugins allow you to extend the functionality of your website. For example, you could install a dynamic photo gallery plugin in your CMS, giving you both articles and photos.

Example CMS Websites:

Get CMS quotes at Design Quotes

5. Blog Website

Pros: Simplistic article and news management

Cons: Not as flexible as a CMS

Used by: Individuals with an opinion

A blog is a recent type of website. It is a simplified CMS that allows everyday users to post their thoughts and opinions as often as they like. Blogs are more and more often being used to manage articles as well. Blogs are often seen as part of a corporate site because it gives a friendly voice to the company.

Example Blog Websites:

Get blog website quotes at Design Quotes

6. Social Network Website

Pros: Allows groups of people to interact, provides lots of advertising space

Cons: Expensive to set up, hard to attract a user base

A social network is the most recent website phenomenon. A social network is like a community of blogs, email and games all rolled into one. Social network websites are few and far between because the success of a social network depends on having a large community of users. However more and more organisations are beginning to create their own small niche social network websites.

Example Social Network Websites:

Get social network website quotes at Design Quotes

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What is web design?

admin — Tue, 10 Mar 2009 09:04:43 +0000

What is Web Design?

Web design (or website design) is a process the usually goes through each of the following stages:

project brief
web design quotation
design research
graphic design
construction
live website

For a guide to understanding different types of websites (such as CMS and eCommerce) read Different Types of Websites Explained.

Project Brief

A project brief is a general overview of a web design project. The brief describes what you want the website to look like and what you want the website to do. For example a brief might refer to a few existing websites for design reference and provide a step by step description of how a person might interact with the website.

To learn more about writing project briefs read How to Write the Perfect Design Brief.

Web Design Quotation

Finding, comparing and choosing web design quotes can be a long and complicated process. First you need to spend some time looking for companies, submit your brief to each of them, wait for the design quotations to be sent back and finally decide which company you want to use.

Here are three simple guidelines to keep the process running smoothly:

Detailed design briefs equal accurate web design prices.
Face to face meetings clear up information much more quickly than email.
A web design portfolio is essential for evaluating each company.

If you are unsure about what to talk about in a face to face meeting or how to interview web designers read our guide How to Interview Designers.

If you want to skip the finding part of getting web design quotations, get your quotes from Design Quotes. Just enter your criteria and the number of quotes you want to receive and you are matched with the best designers in your area.

Another useful resource is Web Design Buyer's Guide: Comparing Design Quotes.

Design Research

The first thing a graphic designer or web designer will do is research the design. This usually starts with the project brief. The designer will try to understand what 'elements' are required and what the competition is doing so he/she can set your design apart from the rest.

Elements include:

Style (grungy, clean, photographic, illustrated)
Navigation (horizontal menu, vertical menu, drop down menu)
Layout (number of columns, number of rows, alignment)

The main benefit of the research for you is that it ensures that you and the designer have the same idea about what will be made.

A very useful resource for design inspiration is Pattern Tap. This can be used when creating the project brief.

Graphic Design

This is the most creative stage of the web design process. A graphic designer will typically use high-end software like Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator to create a static (non-interactive) version of the website interface. Using the brief and the research, the designer puts theory into practice. Once the designer has completed the graphical aspects, he/she will usually submit a static preview to you for review and feedback. The number of reviews allowed is usually defined in the your design quote.

Construction

This is the most technical stage of the web design process. This stage requires programmers to turn the raw graphic design into a working interactive website. There are many different ways to constuct a website and every web browser (such as Microsoft's Internet Explorer and Mozilla's Firefox) open websites differently. It is important to tell the designers early on that what level of compatibility you want. Depending on the type of website you are buying will dramatically affect this stage. A CMS project or eCommerce project for example will cause this stage of the project to take longer and cost more because the software has to been adapted for the interface design.

Live Website

Once the website is constructed it is then uploaded to a 'website hosting space'. Website hosting is a bit like renting land and the house build on that land is your website. You pay a monthly fee for website hosting which allows people to access your website via the world wide web. Web designers usually have a partnership with one of more website hosting providers and will happily guide you through this process.

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Resources

Different Types of Websites Explained
How to Write the Perfect Design Brief
How to Interview Designers
Web Design Buyer's Guide: Comparing Design Quotes
Pattern Tap - Design Inspiration

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