Small business Web sites blog

Experience (choosing a Web designer)

Creating a Web site is easy, but creating a great Web site that helps your business is hard. Sadly too many people create poor Web sites that damage businesses and lose customers.

General business experience

It’s pretty easy to create a Web site these days by copying and pasting the text and pictures from a leaflet or brochure into a pretty looking template. An experienced professional Web designer thinks about a number of things when starting to create a site including the site’s goals and who it is aimed at. See the previous post on business skills for more details.

Specific business experience

Once you’ve decided on the goals for your Web site, the next step is to find a Web designer that has experience in creating a site that can reach those goals. If you want to sell stuff on your Web site then you need a Web designer with experience in ecommerce (selling stuff on the Internet), while if you want to make use of facebook and twitter you need a Web designer with experience in those. It’s also worth considering if they have created Web sites for similar businesses, if you are an accountant it might be worth looking for a designer with experience in creating sites for accountants. They will have a better understanding of your business and will know what kind of things will work for your Web site.

Print versus Web

Many print designers have moved into creating Web sites. I’ve encountered quite a few of these that sadly don’t realise the big differences between print and Web.

The first big difference is page size. In print, the designer knows the size of the page they are designing for, on the Web you don’t know the screen size of your visitor. This means that the site often looks great (print designers are good at making things look pretty) if you have the same screen size as them. The trouble is they usually have big screens, so the site looks great for a few people but looks horrible for everyone else.

The second is browsers. Many designers who’ve moved from print to Web don’t realise how different sites look in different browsers. There are at least 5 major browsers (Chrome, Firefox, Internet Explorer, Opera and Safari) and they all do things a little different. In fact the same browser usually does things a little different on a Windows PC and a Mac. Don’t forget that somebody might also see your Web site on a Blackberry, iPhone, Palm Pre or other mobile phone. Your Web site needs to work on all these different browsers and a Web site that is great in one browser could be totally broken in another.

The third is download speed. When you print something you don’t need to worry about using lots of big images. On a Web site all these images need to be downloaded. If your Web site has too many large images people won’t wait for it to load and will go elsewhere.

Web standards

There are a number of standards about how the code behind a Web site should be written. A Web designer with experience in these will create a Web site that is more stable and robust. Standards based Web sites separate content, appearance and functionality which helps them reliable on a wide range of devices. The most common standards are HTML (HyperText Markup Language) or XHTML (eXtensible HyperText Markup Language) which is used for content and CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) which is used for appearance.

Accessibility

The Disability Discrimination Act in the UK and other laws around the world state that your Web site should be available to people with disabilities. Your Web site should be made accessible as it is being built, Web sites can be made accessible but this takes much more work. Make sure your Web designer knows about the guidelines for creating accessible Web sites and if they charge extra then look for someone else.

Usability

The ideal situation to make your Web site easy to use is to actually test your Web site with real people. Many simple Web sites don’t have a budget for doing this testing so there are several guidelines that can be followed based on previous research about how people use Web sites. If your site is very complicated or has innovative features you should carry out actual user testing. A good Web designer will know about these guidelines and how to carry out user testing (or know someone else who does).

Search engine optimisation

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is actually a skill in itself, but a good Web designer should have a grasp of the basics. This includes knowledge about using metadata, titles and headings.

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Tags: Choosing a Web designer, CSS, HTML, Small business Web sites

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 20th, 2009 at 3:56 pm and is filed under Small business Web sites.