Website Design & Development

You will find almost countless website design and development companies advertising their website design services on the web. However, what many of them don't highlight is that you, the client, will generally need to provide all of the content you want published &ndash before they can create the website. (This content is usually: the text, the images, the logos and the site map.)

Raw Ingredients

Bits and bobs that can help make it happen

One of my clients recently asked me to write his website from scratch. All he had was the colour scheme, his contact details and the description of his industry for me to go on. From these bare bones, we created a 30 page website which not only advertised his services, but was fully optimised to gain rankings in the search engines (each page had unique Meta data and content). So it's perfectly possible to start from a phone call and not much more, but if you have any of the following raw ingredients, they all help.

An overview of what type of website you want and what you need it to accomplish
An idea of what colours, flavours and tastes you have
Your logo, business card, brochures, fliers and any other material produced for your brand or business
Basic business information: contact information, outline of your services/products, founder or company information

Website Content

Basic ingredients for any website recipe...

The key components of any website are reasonably simple. Six main ingredients (pages) are required to cook up a basic website - these are:

Home Page - The home page is without doubt the most important page of your entire website. This page introduces your business, includes keywords, establishes your brand image, leads website visitors around your business � it is the first taste that anyone gets of your business, so it has to look good, read well and entice people to try more from your 'kitchen'.
About - Telling your potential customer more about your business is an important way of establishing credibility and trust. Often included in the 'About' page is information about the company's beginnings, key staff or the whole team, company mission statement, aims and service values.
Services/ Products - If you don't outline clearly what your business does, you won't get any business. This section of your website is all about satisfying people's needs and ensuring that you are delivering benefits to them and their businesses.
Location - For many businesses, especially in the tourism industry, it's imperative that people know where your business is physically located, especially in relation to major cities and towns. A Google map makes this easier than ever to do and Google Places can ensure that your web business is found quickly by local, as well as international, searchers.
Testimonials - Creating trust is really important for online businesses, as no-one really knows who is behind a website facade. Publishing testimonials or case studies (ideally with real pictures) can help allay any worries about 'cowboy' businesses and 'here today, gone tomorrow websites'.
Contact - A page about how to contact your business is another essential page. Often this page includes a form, as well as contact details.

This basic website recipe can be tailored to your own particular tastes and requirements - this just gives you an idea of how easy it can be to lay out a basic 'site map' (i.e. an index of your website contents).

Images

More than just the decoration, these create the wow factor

Search engine optimisation is one of the cornerstones of every website I work on, and search engines and search engine optimisers like text. So you won't receive any encouragement from me to include lots of Flash graphics, animations and splash entry pages on your website. However, images are massively important in creating the right look and feel for your website. (And images can be useful for search engine optimisation as they can be captioned and tagged with alt text). Poor quality images will only give your business a bad image in more ways than one. So, if you do not have a stash of images, here's what we do:

Source relevant and professional looking images from photo libraries such as www.istockphoto.com or the Tourism New Zealand Image Library
Alternatively, commission a professional photographer to take high-quality images.

If you have a company logo, this can also be included in your website design. If not, our Web designer can create one for you which can also be used on your company letterhead, business card and signage.

All costs will be included in your project quote.

Website Design

Making something look truly great involves some hard work behind the scenes

You may want to get really involved in what some of my clients call 'the fluffy bits' � the design side of things: the colours, the fonts, the white space effect, the navigation, the positioning, the images, the logo... just about everything. Or you may just decide to let the Web designer do his thing and get on with designing you a website (already knowing what you do and don't like).

Before the whole website design runs away from you though, it's easy enough to get the Web designer to create a mock-up of what the website home page would look like - a first proof or concept, if you prefer the publishing lingo.

All the websites we work on benefit from:

Search engine friendly structure, format and content
Engaging marketing messages positioned to their best advantage
Attractive, good-looking designs with clear, uncluttered navigation for usability
Our passion for creating great websites!

Website Development

Time for the Masterchefs of the webby-world to take the stage...

If you want more than just the basics of a website, let's talk about shopping carts, blogs, content management systems and clever programming solutions from the tech heads. If you get too techy for me to follow you (it happens), I'll put you into the good hands of some very friendly tech-heads. At the moment, the team is very contented to be working on:

Basic HTML websites (brochure sites that require little maintenance)
Wordpress Content Management websites (large content sites that the client updates)
Online payment integration, website updates and bug fixes

Contact me for a free cost estimate for your website design project.

Service Fees

View fees for website design and other services.

Please let me know if you would like to discuss or commission a related service not specifically mentioned here. You may also like to find out what my clients say about working with me.

Web Design & Website Development: Words, Pictures & Design for Static, E-Commerce & Content Management System-Based Websites

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