There are a few things you should pay attention to when designing your website, pertaining to the type. Contrast should be a big part of the typeography, you want something easy to read and somethign that’s easy on the eyes. You can never go wrong with black type on a white background, though white on black may be a little more diffcult to read for long blocks of text. Black and white are ideal though they might not always work for your site, so be sure to pick colors that compliment each other and are easy to read.

Space is also important, it’s good to have a balance on a page, you don’t want to clutter the page with too much text when  you’re designing. Though it’s also important to have a good sized text, whether the text be too big or too small, this could be a problem. You want to keep any body of text at about a 12 pt, that’s an easy size to read for most people, but obviously you might want to have your headlines at a bigger size. Generally people are going to skim a site until they read a headline that grabs their attention, so it important to differentiate the body from the headlines.

Following those general rules should help with your site, though the true test is you or someone with a keen eye check it out to make sure it looks good.

1. Define your project. Such as which features are included or how many pages are being designed.
2. How much can you afford to pay for your web design?
3. How long will the project take to complete?
4. What will the projects output be?
5. Can you revise the final product? Or do you have a say in the design and what the site will look like?
6. Are you allowed to see in process designs, or only when the entire website is completed?
7. How will changes be charged for changes, extra work, or additions to the project.

Next you will want to make sure that you have prepared the content that you want to use for your website design. A common way to start will be to create a outline of the pages with a brief description of the page content. Once this outline is completed you’ll want to make sure that you write out, in full, all of the content for each page . Lastly, you’ll need to acquire all of the digital art that you need for your website. This includes photographs, images, digital art.

To keep it simple, for a small website, these are the main items that you will need to get started.

What we suggest to customers who aren’t online yet, in this difficult time, is to start off small. For an existing company who isn’t on the internet yet, there will be a lot to learn and this learning curve will take time. We are here, as a company, to assist in shortening that curve but it will take a little time for your employees to adjust and for you as a business owner to become comfortable with the new spending on developing your internet presence.

Know your goals, & Prioritize

Develop a list of priorities for your online website, store, or content driven site. It is important to remain focused as this will help you to save money and to complete your goals on schedule. To start out, open your favorite word processing program and type out your top ten requirements or goals for your website. Make sure that these are reasonable, and within a budget that you can afford. Here are a few sample goals:

1. Connect with customers online.
2. Sell my products online, 100 total items.
3. Accept orders online.
4. Spend less than $3,000 to setup.
5. Easily add new content and make website changes.

So, you get the point about how to list out the goals for your website. Try to make sure that these goals are als0 action based and can have a deadline associated with them. For example, I want my website only in one month. This will help as you move forward in developing and keeping the project on schedule.

Have an affordable budget in mind

The great thing about the web, is that you can start with just about any budget in mind. A small website can be setup for about $500 dollars, or even less. But this depends on the list of goals that you wrote up above as to what your startup cost is going to be. Now, once you get past starting up your website you should figure in monthly costs involved with your website.

The monthly costs are for making consistent improvements to the website. The amount of your monthly budget can be in dollars or in man hours, depending on the project that you choose. For the smallest of projects, you can simply figure in 1-2 hours per month, or $85-125 dollars. This time can be dedicated to a whole hosts of different focuses for your website, such as:

1. Adding new content
2. Adding new features
3. Improving graphic design or layout
4. Search engine optimization

There are many more options for improving you site consistently which we go over with our clients directly. If you have more questions about this please contact us directly using the telephone number at the top of the web page.

But please remember to keep an affordable budget, keep working on improving your online presence, and lastly do put off starting a new project as the sooner you start the better off you will be.