Most of the clients I work with have no idea that their website domains can be purchased for usually about $7.50 instead of about $12.00, that’s a lot of savings, especially if you’re getting your website domain for multiple years. Usually they have a renewal code too, otherwise Godaddy renews your domain at the retail price, ouch.

You can do a google search for websites that list the discount codes, just type in something like Godaddy promo code and you’re bound to find something in the first couple results, works every time!

I just got done doing some more website updates for a client who’s website hasn’t gone live yet. I’ve gone through about 8 lists of modifications with them, with everything from “make the font-size bigger and bolder” to “add this country song to the front page and make it play automatically.” By the 8th time around, your developer probably won’t even tell you that adding that music to your website will a) slow down your site tremendously. b) won’t serve any purpose because your business has nothing to do with music. c) is copyright infringement (no, having the CD still doesn’t help) and most importantly, d) piss of your visitors.

In fact the only thing your website developer probably will tell you is that it’s going to cost an extra $50, not that he can’t do it in 15 minutes for a more honest $15, but now he can’t post the website in his portfolio because it’s embarrassing, number one. Number two, it’s interesting to see how much you’ll shell out for a such a mindless change. Anyhow, the point of this article is actually how to plan a website, sorry for rambling.

So, to plan a website out properly, you need these items, in this order:

1. The website’s goals. What is it going to achieve? Why do you need a website in the first place? This shapes the websites and gets your head in the right place.
2. Pages or Overall Content. To achieve those goals, what pages or content does the website need? What does it need to say?
3. Organization. How are you going to organize the website? Come up with a list of pages and how all the pages are connected? Will you need a content management system to stay up to date?
4. How to you envision the organization fitting into a design? This is where the website developer can start to help, and maybe help a little on organization too, but you need think about the content (2) before.
5. What kind of designs fit with your content and brand image? What kind of designs do you like? What kind of colors do you like? Do you have a logo? Find other websites that you think are similar in style or design and send them to your designer.
6. Write-up each page’s content. This is important to have before the website is created, otherwise you’ll have to pay for modifications because you’re bound to realize that you need more pages than you originally thought.
7. Gather all the pictures or use placeholder images in your content write-ups. It’s important for everyone to know what images will go where, especially if you’re going to need a content management system.
8. Approve as soon as possible. The longer you keep your website designer lingering, the greater the chance he’ll move on to other things and lose the enthusiasm he had in your website. With that gone, the code will get sloppier and so might the design. Keep the process fast and fresh, try to work on his time line and you’ll get a better product.
9. Pay on time. Don’t ever start a website if you don’t have the money.
10. When it comes to modifications, ask more questions. The idea here is that the website designer probably has a lot of reason for making things the way they are and they know a thing or two about what is right or wrong in a website. Ask questions and learn all the angles about something before giving a suggestion.
11. Test in IE6, IE7, IE8, Fire Fox, Safari (on a Mac), and Chrome. It’s important to test in multiple browsers – some website developers might forget to do this. Your site should work in all aforementioned browsers, otherwise the developer is shorting you.
12) Ask the developer if they have any type of affiliate program. Chances are you’ll know someone that needs a website in the future. If you like your designer, see if you’re able to get anything out of giving them extra business. Maybe free hosting or something, who knows?

Here are some qualities to look for in a host:

• Reliability – up-time is obviously one of the most important factors.
• Speed – having a fast loading website is another very important factor.
• Software/Tools – your website has certain requirements and not all hosts can meet those.
• Space – this is usually not an issue unless you plan on hosting hundreds or thousands of movies.
• Support – you will run into issues. Having a good support team will ensure your problems are solved quickly.
• Security – Another important and somewhat overlooked factor.

You basically have three types of hosts – shared, VPS, and dedicated. Shared hosting is basically for smaller website accounts. They come in different packages, allowing you to manage multiple websites on each. A shared hosting account is usually pretty good for most sites or small site administrators, controlling 10 small to medium websites or less. Small to medium would be something around 300 daily page views or less, but of course it depends on how much content each page view or visitor is downloading. Do the math and you can figure it out.

Over the years I’ve used several different shared hosting accounts through my own efforts and for clients. I’ll speak about some of the popular ones and what I found. 1and1 – I used 1and1 for a while, and still might have an account over there. They offer pretty good value, but the support isn’t too great. The reliability started off great several years ago, then sites weren’t always loading, or they were loading pretty slow. That’s when I realized they were going down hill. The next one is Bluehost. They give you a good amount of control, but every time I’ve used them, their speed has been terrible. With my experiences, I would stay away. Godaddy seems to be a popular choice now days. Godaddy is okay. Their support was relatively good the only time I had to call. Their panel, however sucks. It’s hard to get around and when you need to login to MySQL to do something it always takes forever. They don’t give you too much control either, and a lot of options are hidden and you have to dig for them, but most would know that if you’ve registered a domain with them, checking-out is like trying to get out of the center of a flea market. Their value is good for the speed and up-time they have. The speed isn’t anything too amazing, but for shared hosting and the price, it’s not bad. I also used DreamHost a few years ago. When I used them, they were pretty good, great control, pretty good prices, good speed and reliability. I haven’t used them for a while, so it’d be best to read how they are now and if things have changed. And another popular one I’ve used is Host Gator. They’ve been one of my recent favorites for shared hosting. I’d pick them over the other ones currently. Control is good there, speed is good for the price, and so far, haven’t had a problem with reliability.

A VPS is the next step for serious administrators that need all the tools and control available to them, but don’t need any serious memory for traffic needs yet. A VPS can hold several websites and handle a good amount of traffic as well, again, depending on how much content is being downloaded. I use a VPS the most and usually have about 60,000 monthly page views, which it handles without a sweat. Servint is pretty good, and many other companies have been offering VPS packages now, which I can’t really comment on because I haven’t used too many.

When you need a dedicated server, you have a lot of choices, and it’s good to get it right because they can be pricey. The one I used before was SoftLayer. I’d recommend them easily since they were great and I did a good 12 hours of research and a lot of phone calls before making my decision.

So there you have it! If you have any positive experiences (or negative) feel free to share them.

Tampa Website Design, TampaCreations.com

The thing that makes Tampa Creations different from most other website development firms is that it offers a full range of web services, from website design all the way to social network marketing. This makes Tampa Creations a “web presence” provider, not just a website design firm. The benefit to businesses here is that one company handles the vertical integration of your online development and marketing, allowing each part to be connected and play a vital role in supporting the other.

Just how important is vertical marketing? Throughout years of working with clients, most clients don’t believe or don’t think about if they want to incorporate search engine optimization or website marketing techniques into their website in the future. Of course, many of those clients visit that possibility after they learn that traffic doesn’t come from nothing, you need optimization and internet marketing to drive the traffic to your website, after all, that’s one of the main benefits of having a website… free web traffic!

It’s important to look at your business and online strategy and decide if going after the web traffic is right for your model. If it is, having vertical integration allows your website to be built from the ground-up incorporating the best search engine optimization methods and even to start the marketing early on, kind of like priming an engine. If you don’t do this early on, it can become an overwhelming task to revisit and incorporate the right optimization, and even worse if the website has to be re-designed to allow it to rank properly. Don’t make these costly errors, put the additional small investment now into your website and design to prepare it for the future.

1) Domain. Probably one of the most important is the domain you’re going to establish your business at. Choosing the domain comes down to the ultimate goal of your internet presence. If you’re looking for SEO then you should probably have keywords in your domain. If you’re looking for branding, then you should probably have something creative and memorable. Perhaps you’re looking for both, try then to fit a keyword or two into one short, memorable domain. The reason a domain is so important is because you’ll be investing a lot of time and work into either telling clients about the domain or optimizing it for ranking in Google. In either case, changing the domain later on will be a mess!

2) Social Networking. Some people get too overwhelmed with the idea of running MySpace, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. accounts. Figure out what your clients are interested in/sign-up on and use one, maybe two of these. That way you’re not spreading yourself to thin. If you’re on every network and not updating each as much, no one will care to read what you have to say. If you stick to one or two, you’ll be able to update your profile more often and keep people interested in coming to visit you.

3) Blogging. Think serious about this, don’t just start a blog because you can. You’ll need to stick with it. What’s the purpose of your blog? Do you have enough time to invest into your blog to keep it fresh (like the social network thing)? How often will you update? Try writing a couple articles first to see if it’s as easy as you think. Also, if you’re looking into blogging just to help people stay updated on your company, consider news releases instead. You can even use the same Wordpress (or other) software, just brand your blog as a new release platform. That way, you’re not expected to write so much or so often.

4) Multi-Websites. It’s fine to have more than one website, but each website should serve its own purpose. Don’t lose sight of each site’s purpose, keep clear goals for each site and measure them to make sure each site is working its end. Many clients will want to have multiple sites because they got a couple great different domains. Just because you have two domains doesn’t mean you need two websites! A domain is about $7/year. Hold on to the domain until you find something useful to do with it (as opposed to hiring a website developer to create a whole other site you don’t need, confusing yourself to what really is the purpose). Also, don’t put up a mirror copy of one site on another domain! If you desperately need to use another domain, you can use it for memorability/ease of typing and have it forward to main website, but no mirroring! This can destroy your online rankings as I’ve seen it dozens of times with clients.

For our purposes, we’ll pretend your audience is strictly within the United States. The next step then is to think about what the main goal of your website is and how the colors will help reflect the attitude your website needs to achieve its goals. Here are some examples of associations:

1. Saturated colors are good for youth related items, and semi-saturated for fun, exhilarating, etc.
2. Pastel colors signify peace, relaxation, etc.
3. Dark colors can be good for evil, secret, technological, etc.

You also have some specific colors with some overall associations. Not to say they’re specific to these in particular, but they work well for what they’re paired with:

1. Royal/Dark Blue is typically associated with corporate.
2. Red associated with extreme
3. White associated with large/enterprise
4. Green associated with eccentric

These are just some examples. To find more, visit popular websites and see what they’re using to influence the vibe of their visitors. Influcing a vibe can be very helpful in raising conversions and accomplishing goals so when you’re thinking about your next color scheme for your website, be sure to put some extra thought and research into it instead of just going with your favorite color (pink).

Effective Communication
One of the most important requirements for your website is good communication between you and the designer you choose. Without a doubt, a local designer can meet face to face with you (although meetings might add more to the cost) which will typically increase effectiveness of the communication. But if another designer is remote, it doesn’t mean effective communication cannot be achieved. A good designer knows the right questions to ask to increase the effectiveness of the communication and ultimately, get you what you want. Choose the more experienced, better designer over the local designer in this case. In the case of international designers, the prices are typically good, but communication suffers drastically. You’ll probably end up spending more for an often, lower-end product in the long run, with lots of headaches as well.

Pricing
As noted, a local designer will usually be a little more. A good remote designer will know how to work efficiently, but a fair remote designer might lack the experience necessary to ask the right questions. An international designer will usually be the cheapest per hour, but will take several corrections to get what you wanted due to the communication barrier.

Scale
The larger the website, the more effective and efficient the communication must be. If you need a  large corporate website that ties into your existing infrastructure, you may not have any other choice but to hire a local company. Medium and small websites can be done either way, as long as you’re comfortable sharing files and information with new technology. If you don’t like to use e-mail or would be opposed to installing an FTP program, allowing you to upload large files for your designers, you should probably go with a local company.

Goals
Having your own website goals and ideas complete or close to it allows the designer to get started right away. If you’re unsure about several parts of your website, it may take a couple meetings with a designer to get your pages and ideas complete.

1. The Goals. The goals of your website are more important than anything else because, hey, that’s why you’re making it! A development firm will need to know the the goals so they can, to the best of their abilities, help achieve your site’s goals in the creation of it. A site designed to ring a phone number is completely different than an ecommerce site – the design, the flow, the information… it’s all different.
2. Communication. The communication between you and your development firm is very important! You may think speaking over the phone or in person is the best way to get things done, when it reality, that can slow the process down a lot, depending on the project’s needs. Get comfortable with e-mail because that’s all your developer does all day – checks his e-mail. One of the benefits of e-mail is that it’s written down somewhere where it won’t get lost. The developers can come back to everything you’ve said and make sure they’re following instructions correctly. E-mail makes for a very clear communication channel.
3. Examples. You probably have some ideas of what kind of design you’re looking for, but explaining those ideas with words is a very difficult thing to do. To communicate designs more effectively, find several examples of what you’re looking for, what you like, and what you don’t like! You should find at least 10 examples. Good places of where to start… Google: award winning websites. Web 2.0 website designs.
4. Page List. Most likely your website won’t have over 50 pages. If that’s the case, you need to create a list of every page you want and the types of information you want to have on it. You’ll also need to show how these pages are represented in the site navigation – do you place some of them on a main navigation, some in drop downs, on the side, at the bottom, etc.? Your developers can help you answer the latter after they go over your page list, priorities and site goals.
5. Content. A surprise to many, content doesn’t just appear, it has to be written! Most development firms won’t be the ones doing it for you, you’ll have to do it! Spend a good deal of time thinking about how you want to lay out your content and information on the website. Your visitor needs a clear path from everything they could be looking for… funneling their actions down to your main goal or goals. Once you know how you want to organize it, spend even more time writing it. After all, this is what truly makes up your website!
6. Pictures. It helps a great deal to have handy the pictures you want to use and knowing on what pages to use them. Designers will want to organize your page content around your pictures, so sending both pictures and content together will often lead to a better design than sending one and then the next. Even if you know you’ll want to have a picture on a page, but you’re not sure what it is, you’ll want to make the designer aware of that. A lot of designers use the same stock photography websites – sxc.hu, stockxpert.com, istockphoto.com. Don’t use Getty Images, unless you really want to shell out some cash. Oh, and don’t even think about using Google Images. If that came to mind, you’ll need to learn more about copyright law. One more note, when supplying pictures to your designers, make sure you supply high quality images, and nothing embedded into Word either.
7. Open Mind. Through the process, the designers and developers you’ll be working with will have many ideas for your site that may differ from your original plan. Some of these might be good, some might be bad, but it pays to listen. If your developer says that having an all Flash site will hurt your search engine optimization, and therefore, you’re search rankings, it would be good to consider if you would ever want your website to rank in Google and other search engines in the future, otherwise you might be making your website all over again next year.
8. Basic Marketing Plan. Many people expect that when their website goes live, people will automatically see it. Unfortunately, no one visits your website unless something is sending them there, whether it be search engines, business cards, flyers, banner ads, billboards, etc. You need to have some basic marketing ideas to drive traffic to your site. You can communicate these ideas to your developers and they can actually implement ways to track different campaigns for you.
9. Realistic Expectations and Homework. You’ve checked around and you’ve got 10 different quotes for your future website, all around $2000. Your cousin’s friend says he’ll do it for $400. Maybe he’ll create your site, but you need to do your homework and visit websites that he’s done previously, because no developer is going to work at $5.00/hr no matter how simple you convince yourself the work is. The fact is that a well-working website takes time to create, especially if it’s dynamic (loads changing content). I’ve worked with many clients that have wasted valuable time and money with an inexperienced developer their first time round. The old saying is true… you get what you pay for.
10. The Check! Most developers will ask for a percentage up front, but either way, you need to have the cash before you start hiring anyone. After all, you wouldn’t go out to eat with an empty wallet and ask the cook to take a rain check… or maybe ask him to cut the bill up for you in monthly increments?

Hopefully this list will allow you, the client, to design your new website more effectively and more efficiently with your future development firm. Another one that isn’t on this list is the list itself! Funny enough, when you start gathering all these items, you’ll realize plenty of things you’ll want to change about the website. If you can do this ahead of time, it will save you and the developers a lot of headache and money!

Now a little tip for users, most websites use sessions to keep you logged in, and in most cases you can use your browser’s back button to go back to the original page you requested before it redirected you and refresh that page, and you’re there. But it shouldn’t have to be that way. If you’re a developer, you need to think ahead in your coding and login script. You’ll need to implement some way of redirecting the user to the protected page that they originally requested after they login. This is easier said than done sometimes, especially if your script is already written.

Some extra tools to use here if you’re in a tight spot for coding: Cookies and Header Redirects. Let’s say you’re script is already written… it looks something like this:

1. Person clicks on link to a protected page on the site, requesting the protected page
2. You have some code that either forwards them to a login page or displays a login page
3. The login and it automatically goes to/displays a main account page.

It can be tough to implement and carry variables over these pages and between files, so storing and passing the initially requested URL can be difficult. Although, using Cookies can work pretty well. The basic idea is to interrupt the second step. When the code is forwarding them to a login page/content, it’ll first check to see what the URL is and store it as a Cookie variable. Then when they are logging in, before it sends them off to the main account page, we can check that Cookie to see if it’s set and what’s in there. It would be smart to compare that value to an array of allowed values and forward them to the necessary page/content afterwards, if it matches something in your control array. To store that URL, I would use a regular expression to grab the page name and since it’s likely that some of your protected pages will have GET vars attached, take those variables and store them in a separate cookie, later appending them if the page matches what’s in your control array. You shouldn’t really need to deal with POST variables between a non-protected and a protected requested URL.

Clients can ignore form in two ways, either by not caring or by forcefully pressing designs that they want to be installed (and not necessarily what their market or business needs). Unfortunately, both of these can be detrimental to their website’s success. And when we talk about form and aesthetics, what we’re really getting at is how the website makes the consumer feel. It is the vibe that the website passes through to the consumer. This vibe can be any number of feelings… trust, prestige, low price, etc. That feeling helps the consumer to believe your message (function). Essentially, the look of your website becomes a warm-up for your visitor before the big game… the function and message. This warm-up happens instantaneously, right as the user see the website it is instantly judged and a vibe is sent.

Let’s put some examples to use. We’ll start with the vibe of the site since that it what the end goal here is.

• A bank wants to instill trust above all else in its visitors. A trustworthy design is not necessarily artistic or on the verge of being brand new (or what might be called a Web 2.0 design right now). It requires a sense of security and history, represented with many lines and lots of text. Smaller text (11 or 10 pixel) represents professionalism, and therefore further instills trust. A clean, simple color scheme to, again, reflect the bank’s professionalism. A simple, small logo near the top will do since a bank knows that its brand is big and does not need to be flaunted (because a larger logo would represent insecurity, passing an unwanted vibe to the visitor). Let’s look at some large bank websites:http://www.bankofamerica.com

  http://www.citibank.com

  http://www.wellsfargo.com

  http://www.suntrust.com

  http://www.wachovia.comSo you get the picture… essentially all these websites conform to most of the above description. They seem professional and knowledgable at first glance, which comes only from the design itself. Wachovia.com had the worst vibe of them to myself personally, and upon discovery, I pinpointed a couple things that cause it… One, the silver gradiented sidebar was a little too flashy, making it harder to concentrate on the text and form that lie on top… And Two, the lack of lines and separation (especially the content from background) make the text seem new and empty, something that doesn’t send messages of trust to the visitor.

  Of course, we can find far worse than Wachovia, however. Let’s look at a smaller bank with much less of a design budget…

  https://www.bankiowa.com/home/home

  Even the URL structure doesn’t make too much sense (…home/home), but on to the design… There seems to be quite a few too many colors used, especially colors with too high of saturation which typically send a vibe of youth (bold reds, blues, yellows, etc.). I like this example because the functionality of the website appears to be very good. It’s well organized, easy to read, etc. But the colors and overall design of the website don’t really produce a feeling of trustworthiness, or even community (if that’s what was intended). There’s very little text, which makes the bank seem new, and the spacing attributes to that as well. Let’s look at another example…

  http://www.thebankks.com/index.html

  I almost believed this was an agricultural site instead of a bank. Of course, they’re targeting their market which may be primarily agriculture, but that doesn’t mean they can’t do both effectively. The graphics, font changes, and especially the farming pictures send more of feeling of informative instead of trustworthy. Of course it’s possible to give off a vibe of trust while still maintaining a fix towards agriculture for your market…

  https://www.farmbureaubank.com/

  A good sense of trust when visiting the site. And if they wanted to learn a little more towards agriculture on the design, they could use some farming pictures in their slideshow, simple, yet effective. And finally…

  http://www.farmbank.net/

  Quite different from the typical banking website and I’m sure their priorities are in different places than most of the above banks. After all, why design to instill trust? So you can keep visitors confident that their money is safe (there by keeping your customers) and attracting new ones. My assumption is that this bank probably doesn’t have too much competition in their locations, and if they do, they would certainly begin losing potential customers that value online security.

• The next example is the last one since these comparisons are getting to be somewhat long. But were going to do something entirely different to step out of the box of what my be stereotyped as “good design.” Remember, a good design achieves its goals! We’re going to do a pool construction company now. Let’s say you and the wife decide on getting a built-in pool (you can move to Florida too, to play long if you need to).The pool construction company’s goals is to sell you a pool. Your goal is to find the right pool at the right price, that’s it, right? Kinda… you probably already have in your mind what the right price is, and that can’t be changed, but what can, is the right pool. The right pool to you is just a feeling. It’s a feeling from something you’ve read in a magazine, seen in a movie, or maybe even at your neighbors’. The point here is, is that you have an idea or a feeling of what you want, and you can describe it to the different construction companies, but it’s the company that can match that feeling with your price that will win the bid. So how do you as the construction company match that feeling?

  Well first it would take some research and experience to understand what it is most people want in their pool and what feelings they have when they describe it. A pool to most people is a place where they can relax and forget about the stresses of everyday life. To others, it may be entertainment, something that’s exciting and fun! So we have two pretty different vibes, but it’s still possible to include both of these into a design. Vibes that the website wouldn’t want to portray are feelings of stress and discomfort or just plain boring. Since people understand that these companies don’t spend great deals of money on their website, they won’t be necessarily needing a very professional design, and in fact, too professional of a design might turn off some visitors because that company will look like the expensive company. On the other hand, some visitors will be looking for just that – a trustworthy and reliable company that they don’t mind paying a little extra for. This is where knowing your market and what customers you want comes very handy! For the purposes of this, we’ll leave out professionalism and just show a couple examples on the two positives of what we’re looking for: relaxation and fun.

  http://www.signaturepools.com/

  http://www.palacepools.com/

  http://www.artesianpools.com/

  http://www.allstatepools.com/

  Now, although I may argue with having sounds play automatically on a website, there’s no doubt that these sites do a decent job of instilling relaxation and/or fun in the visitor from their designs. On the other hand, these ones don’t instill that feeling as well:

  http://www.swanpools.com/

  http://www.elitepoolbuilders.com/

  http://www.abovegroundpoolprofessionals.com/

  Keep in mind pictures are one of the greatest ways to instill a feeling in your visitor. Having an integrated slideshow of pictures can really help connect with that predefined feeling a visitor has. If you don’t have a slideshow, try to choose the most common of images that have the greatest impact of exactly what the visitor is looking for. The last website posted doesn’t have a very flattering picture of the above ground pool, but it at least shows what is offered so visitors know they are in the right spot. Unfortunately, some visitors require a bit more – they want to know that this is the pool company that will sell them they’re dream, not just their pool.

When looking into the design of a website, it’s critical that you think back to the overall goals of the website and work your way forward through the visitor and back to the design. This backwards process will ensure all the connections are in place for an effective design.