Content Creations

This is another article that I wrote a while back but since it has some good information, I thought I would give it an encore. I do a lot of web site content work and in the process, I have gotten to know many different types of web designers. Some good and some bad. I wrote the article below to help people that are new to the subject make the right decision.

Hiring a website designer

A website has become a necessity if you want to be taken seriously in the business world. Knowing this, there are some web design companies that will take advantage of your inexperience. I overheard a conversation the other day while I was eating lunch. A businessman at a nearby table was telling a colleague about his site. He said he had paid 6,000 dollars for it already and when his friend asked what it looked like, he didn’t know. It had been in development for over seven months and they had yet to show him a mock-up (a sample of how it would look). Since many people are unfamiliar with the process of creating a website, they cannot tell when they are being taken for a ride.

I have been in and around websites and their developers for years, so let me give you a few guidelines. Websites will vary greatly according to complexity and size. We will use a standard five page business website with no e-commerce (a shopping cart) and nothing complex. Many companies have a one to two month waiting period after you sign a contract with them but before the work commences. This is required for two reasons. They need time to finish the sites they are working on and they give you time to get your content together. A great number of web designers do not handle the written content of the site but we will talk more about that later.

After you get to the front of the line and they are ready to commence work, they will generally show you a mock-up. This is a static page done in a program like Word, to give you an idea of how the site will look. When you are happy with the result, they begin work in earnest and a good company will have a site ready to go live in two to three months. That means there should be a maximum of a five-month turn around time for a simple business site. If it is taking longer then it is time to ask them to see what has been accomplished. Tell them it doesn’t need to work or be pretty but you want to see the work in progress. If they will not show it to you for any reason, it is time to worry. Also watch for the people who will suddenly get really busy and can’t be reached by phone for extended periods.

Let me go back to what I was saying about content earlier. It will usually be up to the client to write the content for the site unless the designer has a writer on staff. Generally the person writing your code is not the same person you want writing your content, you want someone specialized in writing for marketing and sales. Be careful that your designer doesn’t just cut and paste text from another website to put into yours. Not only does it irritate people like me, that do business writing for a living but plagiarism can get you both into legal trouble. There is an easy way to see if you are safe. I recommend a website called www.copyscape.com. You can go there and enter your web address and if there are any websites on the Net with big chunks of the same text, it will display them. As an example, try running mine through it, it is www.abusinesswriter.com. It should display one website because I recently changed my domain and it is pulling up my old site. Now input your website or input the sites from a particular web designer if you are thinking of using them. If more than a couple of sites come up, I would steer clear. By keeping a few simple precautions in mind, you will have no trouble finding a professional and honest web designer to build your web presence.

>>As an addendum to this article. I have been doing the writing for a company that I have a lot of trust in and recommend highly. If you are in the market for a website, check out Top Flight Websites.