I’ve been building and designing websites professionally for the past 8 years and there is a lot that goes into a good website design.

A professionally presented business website is a powerful and essential marketing tool: it’s the first thing prospective customers will look at before they decide to contact you. If the copy on your website is not written to an acceptable standard, it may be losing you customers. It’s not enough just to have amazing graphics and imagery: you need the words to make it complete. Is the spelling correct? Are punctuation marks in place? Does the copy make sense? These are questions that website designers should be asking themselves before they upload a new site.

One of the biggest flaws with website copy is inconsistency: for example the word ‘website’. Some sites spell it as one word, some as two words; as far as I am aware both are acceptable, but not both versions on the same site! In my opinion, a lack of consistency will deter a significant amount of would-be customers from using the services of a company that has not taken the trouble to proofread their website.

Poor spelling on a website is another costly but avoidable mistake.
The majority of visitors will leave the site very quickly if they find too many spelling errors. This again will give them the impression that the site owners don’t really care; and they would be right! I am also convinced that copy that has been ‘padded out’ with insignificant trivia is also a big turn-off for visitors – clear, concise and informative is the order of the day.

Anything containing textual content should as a matter of course be proofread: it’s important that not only are mistakes in spelling, punctuation and grammar found and corrected, but that the text flows smoothly for the reader. The copy on a website should not be treated as the ‘poor relation’ of the project. You can have the most up-to-date, eye-catching graphics available but you will still need well-written copy to compliment them.

There are the odd few web design companies around that will happily inform visitors how they can supply them with a state-of-the-art website but then insert second-rate copy, which totally negates any good work they have achieved. This will reduce the initial impact of the site, and more often than not will have an adverse effect on business.

It pays to have the copy checked professionally, whether the design company has written it themselves or had it supplied by the client; it may cost a lot less than you think to have a website proofread – it could cost you considerably more if you don’t!

Remember: if visitors to your site cannot find the information they are looking for because of badly written copy they will simply leave the site. The only people to benefit will be your competitors.

I have personally tried both methods in designing websites and I can tell you that a premade template designed website has no advantages over a custom designed website.

Yet, all the disadvantages.

As far as time goes a good graphic designers can have you a website built in a couple hours, the same amount of time it will take you to buy, download and figure out the template site.

You’ll need all kinds of programs to modify a template website and we’ve bought templates in the past that professional web designers couldn’t figure out how to modify. To make it even more fun if you have a problem with a template website you will find that most template sites don’t have phone numbers on their sites…so you’ll need to submit a ticket.

On the good side I can tell you that the longest we’ve ever had to wait for an answer (when we’ve submitted a ticket for a template problem) was 103 hours. That’s about 5 days, less time than it would take to have a custom designed website with a CMS installed, put online, spidered and ranked in the search engines.

Another problem with buying premade templates is that software like wordpress, osCommerce and just about any other open source software template sites sell templates for is being updated constantly.

So…there is always the chance that the template you just bought isn’t going to work with the latest version of software you are wanting to use it on.

And you always need to use the latest version of software as there is normally a reason that it has been updated.

Seems that no matter where we go now days, we are being told that if we want to be taken seriously we need a website design.

There is no doubt that a professional looking website establishes credibility, in the online world as well as the offline world and it doesn’t matter rather it is for a home-based business or a business based business. The problem most people run into is that they do not know anything about website designs and haven’t a clue as to where to start. To make it worse, there are a lot of alternatives and choices that need to be made when looking for a good looking website design.

To get an idea of how crazy the world of web design is, try calling a couple professional Web designers and getting a price quote. You will be shocked to find that the same simple web design can run anywhere from a few hundred bucks up to several thousand, depending on who you are talk to.

We do web designs for people all around the world, so I am sure it will surprise people when I say you are better off if you can find a good local company to build you website.

Dealing with someone that you are able to walk into their office and sit down with the designer and move things around make it a lot easier on everyone.

While you can find a good local designer by opening your phone book, or doing a Google search or even reading the newspaper, it’s best to make sure that their website is up to pare. A good web design is like a good salesman, they make you feel comfortable, make you feel at home, become your friend, teach you and guide you slowly down the path of becoming a client.

If the web designer’s website is unable to sale you, then chances are your website is going to be unable to sale to your website visitors.

Make sure you shop around and make sure that the designer you decide to go with has a website that is able to convert traffic. If they are making all their money with their off-line marketing then definitely would not want them doing my on-line marketing.

I have heard a lot of people say that it is cheaper to find a local designer that is working out of his home, because he will not have the expenses of a large Web design firm.

I Totally Disagree

I own a large Web design firm here in Colombia South America and I can tell you that my expenses with a larger website business, is in lots of cases, a lot cheaper than it would be if I was doing it all myself.

If I was handling the marketing of my business, answering the phone, making the sales, designing the websites, and doing the programming then I would need to charge a lot more for a website design then I currently do.

Reason being, your website is taking away from all the other functions of my business. Other words, if I take on a project that is going to take me 30 days to do, I would need to charge enough money for that project to pay my bills for the whole month, whereas a large Web design firm needs to only to charge enough to pay the salary of the guy working on the website and make a little profit for themselves.

Your web design only makes up for a small percent of the money the company needs to make this month.

I’ve also heard a lot of people tell others to go to www.elance.com/. I’d stay as far away from these guys as I could get.

We have a really hard time finding good Web designers and programmers, seems every time you find one there working for someone else. If someone is on Elance.com looking for work, chances are they are not good enough to work for a Web Design Company or to get clients on their own. For this reason I would stay away from. I know someone is going to say the economy is really bad and a lot of good designers and programmers are out of work, that may be true for a lot of people but good programmers and designers are in high demand. Everyone I know that can design or program has a job and I am always hiring.

Another misleading way to go is with a web hosting company that offers a build it yourself website building program. The problem with these programs is that you are limited in what you are able to do and to make it worst there is a learning curve in figuring out the program.

You are now stepping away from your business to learn how to use a program and even if you master that program, unless you understand the web and art you are still wasting your time.

Web designing is artwork in its finest form, you are taking all types of different arts and putting them together in hopes of building a website that is powerful enough to create an emotion inside your website visitor that will convince them to purchase your product.

I guess what I am saying is at the end of the day you are better off going with a professional Web design company then trying to find a do-it-yourself program or some backstreet, backyard Web designer.

I get at least a person a day that calls wanting to know if I know of a Web designer in their area. I do know a lot of Web designers, as a matter of fact; I know a lot of very good Web designers. But I do not know all the cities, much less a designer in each one.

I decided to have one of the girls in the office write a little article and then find some Web design companies in that area and post on our blog. Basically, we were recommending Web design companies in areas were clients live.

I was thinking that it was good for everyone, I gave the website visitor the information they were looking for, and the web design company got a recommendation from another web design company.

But no good deed goes unpunished.

Novastar Design (http://novastardesign.com/) appears to get upset when someone recommends them.

Maybe they have never been recommended by anyone before.

But a funny thing happens when you start threatening people, those people start looking into who you are.

So…I went to search of who Novastar Design was.

First stop was there website and want to talk about a bad choice of colors.

For a designer to lack the ability to choose the correct colors when designing a website is bad enough but to lack the ability to choose good colors when building your own site is just sad.

I also noticed that he claimed to have been doing business since 1996.

14 years and still hasn’t learned how to design a website?

I mean this guy doesn’t even have a logo.

I decided to dig a little deeper. So I went to http://www.whois.net/ and looked up his site.

Novastar Design bought the name in 2007.

Now, that makes more sense, his design looks like someone that has been doing business for about 2 years.

But here is a company claiming to have been in business for the last 10 years when in reality they’ve been in business for the last two years.

Here is a business that I was recommending yesterday, that has now brought attention to themselves and I am now saying, “stay the heck away from Novastar Design”.
To lie about something as simple as how long you have been in business is just crazy.

So I will no longer recommend your business, hope we can be friends now.

People seem scared to death of template designs. I’ve been designing custom website designs for the last 8 years and there is not a day that goes by that someone does not make a comment about not wanting a template design.

The best part is when they point out a website and have to ask the question or make the comment that it looks like a template design.

A good website is one that follows a design throughout the site. Other words, when I land on your site the look and feel of the home page should be carried throughout the site. There should not be any drastic design changes from one page to the next. This means that the sites that work the best are templates.

A professional web designer should be designing your website for the audience and not as a means of self-expression for themselves. Your website should solve problems for the site visitor and make their life easier. The graphics and visual design should be in place to help in communication.

The web designer is the middle man between the client and the consumer. Their goal is to make the communication better and not to interfere in the communication with their own personal tastes and influences. This is best done with a template website where the look and feel remains consentient throughout the site.

Most web designers are trying to justify their cost so they spend a lot of time talking about how you don’t want a template site. Then they build you a template site.