Working Inside the Design Instead of With the Client

Some web design professionals run through the same mundane steps they are accustomed to in their own special way, and they never once inform the client about what they are planning to do and what they have or have not done.  So how does their client know what to expect?  How does the website owner know what stage of the process they are in?

Will the website ever actually get done?

The Web Design Process

To establish good project management you must start with a basic plan, a blue print of what is about to happen.  For our customers, we offer a flow chart of the general phases they can expect to occur during the project.  For example, the first phase is mock up designs.  Based on the scope and desires of the customer, we give them an idea of the timeline for that phase and when the next phase should begin.

This gives the customer some peace of mind in that early stage when they are not yet familiar with us, and it helps them to plan their own tasks as well, like when to deliver their next batch of content to us.

Good Tools

Not all customers are alike, so not every one of them will want to use my preferred tool.  But in most cases I invite them to our project management software system, so they can login to a special area to see notes, communication, and files related to their project.  I always have at least one customer who prefers basic email communication or even phone calls over the website system, but we still use the system for our internal staff.

With our project management software, all of our staff can track notes and progress for a project, create task lists and check off items when they are completed, track milestones, and share important files such as programming documentation and mock up designs.

Steamlining & Succeeding

It’s a shame to hear stories from website owners who are disenchanted with the web design industry because they had a poor experience previously.  A great deal of those stories could have been prevented with some basic project management.  Unfortunately, a great designer without quality project management might feel just as overwhelmed and lost as the customer who is wondering what the status of their website is and why it hasn’t launched months after they originally planned.

Whenever you have an email address blatantly published on your web page, even if it is not linked, you are at risk for receiving a lot of spam. Often, automated programs crawl websites throughout the Internet grabbing up email addresses and adding them to spam mailing lists.  They may also use those email addresses to forge the “from” address when they send out their spam messages to thousands of annoyed people.

Spam is a problem that is difficult to completely snuff out but there are ways to minimize the amount of spam you receive, and help keep your sanity!  By using a quality web form, you can hide the email address from the public eye.  By going further and adding something like captcha to the form (those funny codes you have to type in), you narrow down the abuse activity coming from robots (automated programs).

2. You can track your web leads.

A solid analytics program is great if you want high quality tracking of your website traffic, but that won’t guarantee that you can track all the emails and phone calls you received from folks visiting your website.  By creating a form, you have a new way to track visitors’ interest.  You can set up special reports in Google Analytics to track a certain form confirmation page, or set up a unique email account that receives all the requests from that form.

3. You can build your mailing list.

A brief request form can ask a few simple questions, or even just Name and Email Address.  By gathering this info from the opt-in requester, you can build up your mailing list.  At minimum, you can do one good email follow up with that person, and maybe close the sale.  Even better, you can run a regular email marketing campaign to your list of opt-in contacts, reminding them each quarter or perhaps each month about your business and offering the latest promotion.

It’s been a long journey, but we finally made it to launch phase 1.  WEBii has a face-lifted website with more pertinent information to our business.

Why do I say phase 1?  Our website was originally built in 1996 and has since undergone many additions and changes.  It was also custom built with home-grown applications, including our extensive web hosting ordering system.  You probably never realized it, but our tech support section (the “knowledge base” to put a fancy name on it) has hundreds of pages, literally.  So all this made the process daunting, and challenging.

We decided to give the website a refreshed look and re-message our core web pages, which I believe will better represent who WEBii is.  I am always telling business managers to consider if their current website is representative of who they are.  Frankly, ours was not.  We have evolved over these exciting, ever-changing Internet times.

In the 90′s, we were a great web hosting company who designed custom web applications in the background.  We rarely admitted to people that we had web development skills and only worked on select projects upon request.  But as the World Wide Web grew and changed, we recognized a need to be that one stop shop for our customers.  More and more of our web hosting customers were frustrated with an old webmaster who “disappeared”.  They appreciated help from an established company like us who they could rely on.

So the 2000′s really have molded WEBii into more of a trusted custom web development firm, who happens to also be a great web host.  We now have many proven, quality website services that are aiding our customers to expand, market, and run their businesses.  Our new website better demonstrates our offerings in web design, development, and SEO (marketing), yet provides that same high quality web hosting experience and all the resources of our technical support team.

In the next phases of our website progression, we will remodel the Support section as well, and bring even more updated content and video tutorials your way.  We will be updating our ordering system to match the look and feel of our main web pages, but we will do this with delicacy so that current and new customers do not experience errors.  We also continue to enhance our Blog and we are making efforts to release a new E-Book next year.

Leave us a comment on Facebook sometime about our new site – we would love to hear your opinions.

This statement describes both sides of the web design world – the client and the designer.

Looking back at the last 15 years of projects, we see a wide breadth of customers in our portfolio.  From a small real estate firm, a law office, or a marketing agency – to an actor, non-profit organizations, construction businesses, and fitness programs.  WEBii has touched a vast number of small, medium and large companies.

We have also worked on projects ranging from a minor maintenance task to a completely custom-built community management system (complete with online voting, member directories, and content management).  These days we have a fair amount of e-commerce projects under our belt written with a variety of shopping cart software.

On the other side of the ring, in the customer’s corner:

I have heard stories.  Stories about different personalities they happen upon as they try to pursue websites for their businesses.  Unfortunately, some folks who get into web design are not true professionals.  It’s a sad truth.

This is a very fun and trendy business, and lots of people want a part of it.  However, some of those people do not have the professional experience, the patience, or a heart for customer service – which means they might not stick around very long to see your project all the way through.

One of our clients once told me a story about her experience with a former web designer using licensed stock photos and avoiding the payments for them.  A year later, well after her designer had “disappeared” from all contact, the stock photography company came after her (the website owner) to collect the fees for the photos- several hundred dollars of surprise fees!

Another client shared with us that their previous web designer had created a website that was a replica of another competing website on the Internet, and much to their dismay the competitor approached them for copyright infringement.

At WEBii, we are proud of our continued professionalism in the web design industry and our commitment to provide our customers with an attractive, custom-designed, usable solution that will help their businesses succeed.  So consider us the best chocolate in the box (the one with the caramel inside).

A house, but not a very good house.

Probably a building, maybe with 4 walls, but probably in danger of falling down and made of foil and Lincoln Logs.

Knowing the importance of good shelter for my family, I will refrain from building my house.  Instead I will trust quality construction and real estate experts. Because, that is their profession.

Web development is a profession, too.  It is a neat one, and rather trendy, which is why so many folks like to try their hands at it.  But just like building dwellings, it takes experience and on-the-job training to build a quality website.

Is it important to get your website online? Absolutely.  Do you have access to do-it-yourself tools? Probably.  But if building websites and learning “clean” coding techniques is not how you spend most of your time, your website is likely to look like a result of “spare time”.

Here are just a few reasons to hire a good professional web designer like WEBii:

• We won’t put your website project on the back-burner, behind all of your clients
• We will probably code your website using seo-friendly techniques
• Your website won’t be a replica of the 100 other websites that used “that template”
• Your website will be an efficiency tool for your business, instead of an excuse
• You won’t avoid printing your website address on your business card

If you have started your website because you know it is important to have one, kudos.  But before you get in too deep and start making excuses, consider the importance of a website that was made professionally.

Styling this link is quite easy with a little CSS.

Add the following style class to your stylesheet (in your theme):

.cart .totals .checkout-types li {/*my awesome styles go in here*/ }

In one Magento Setup, I created a graphic button background similar to that “big orange checkout button” and included it in this style class.  (Of course you would only want to do this if you are not using one-page checkout, because then you just have 2 duplicate looking buttons on top of each other.) If preferred, you can include the text label on your button graphic and disguise the default text label (which is quite long) with your CSS.

A simple dress-up without modifying any core Magento files.

Magento is one of the many feature-rich shopping cart softwares that WEBii works with to develop customized e-commerce websites for small and medium-sized businesses.  Learn more about our e-commerce services.

With new tools and applications, you can give your Facebook fan page it’s own personality by creating a customized landing page. You can create a specialized experience by designing what new visitors see when they land on your page. For instance, when a user visits your Facebook page, instead of landing on the usual “wall” tab that all of your established fans are used to, they could land on a custom tab like this:

You can customize the tab any way you like, with text, logos, and images. It’s like a micro-site for your Facebook page. Welcome your new fans, promote a deal, or provide useful information – it’s up to you! Learn more about WEBii custom facebook services.

The above example shows the Search Engine Result for the Google Translate page. Notice that they included a relevant description of the page in the title as well as a brief description of what the page offers.

The key with these META tags is to think of them as your billboard on the Search Engine Results Page. The META Title is the headline that grabs peoples attention and the META Description is the short summary that draws them in.

Here are a few tips for working with your own META title and META description tags:

META Title:

• Give each page a unique title
• Make sure the title is relevant to the content on the page
• For maximum compatibility with all search engine make sure your META title is no more than 65 characters
• Think of this as the heading to your “billboard” on the Search Engine Results Page. Try to make the title enticing to the searcher.

META Description:

• Give each page a unique description
• Make sure your META description is relevant to the page and is enticing to searchers
• For maximum compatibility with all search engine make sure your META title is no more than 155 characters
• Think of this as a short advertisement. Engage the searcher with action words.

Websites used to be as simple as HTML (Hypertext Markup Language) code embedded in a single file per page. While this was great for simplicity, it didn’t do much in the way of functionality. The pages could only display one static set of information per page. In today’s current version of the internet, one web page can display a variety of different information depending on what the user inputs. These types of websites are known as dynamic websites because they dynamically generate the web pages each time a visitor visits a page, using a set of data that is retrieved from a database.

Here is an example of the way a static HTML page works:

1) You type “www.example.com” in the address bar of your web browser, and your web browser sends a request to the server of “www.example.com” for the contents of the web page.

2) Your web browser downloads the content of the home page at “www.example.com” in the format of an HTML document.

3) Your browser reads this document, and then displays it in your web browser as a web page.

The way a dynamically generated page works is a little different. Let’s take this blog as an example. This blog runs on a popular blogging platform called WordPress. The WordPress software uses a combination of PHP code and a mySQL database in order to dynamically generate web pages. PHP is a server-side scripting language, which means that all the processing is done on the web server, as opposed to a client-side script like Javascript that runs on your local machine. The short explanation of mySQL is that it stores data on a database server, which can be retrieved through a series of “queries”. If you would like to know more, you can read about it here: mySQL

Here is an example of the way a dynamically generated web page works:

1) You type “www.webii.net/blog” in the address bar of your web browser, and your web browser sends a request for the contents of the web page.

2) The page “index.php” runs its PHP code on the web server, which includes mySQL queries for information from the database. This includes a query of the “latest posts” which WordPress stores in the mySQL database. The “index.php” file finishes running its code, and it outputs the result in HTML.

3) Your web browser reads the HTML output of the PHP file, and then displays it in your web browser.

Either way, your browser still receives and displays HTML information, but the manner in which it is retrieved is very different. The “index.php” file can put out different results depending on the user input. When you click on the “about” link in our blog’s navigation bar, you are actually calling the exact same “index.php” file, but this time the page is dynamically generated to display the “About” information that is stored in the mySQL database. Neat, huh?

Dynamic websites are not for every one. If you simply need to display a couple of pages of text and images, then sometimes bare bones HTML pages can suffice. If you need something better for your organization or business (or even just your personal website), dynamically generated web pages can be designed to give multi-tiered security access, allow you to update your web page from anywhere on the web, and many other powerful features that can turn an otherwise uninspired website into a full blown online presence, a tool to help you get things done.

You may have even seen little Twitter “badges” on people’s websites. These are little modular paces of code that will display your latest tweet right on your own webpage. It’s a pretty neat widget to have if you have a personal page, or own a business and want to keep your customers updated on your latest specials, but don’t want them to navigate away from your web page.

Putting a Twitter badge on your website is actually really easy, because all the hard stuff is done for you already. After you’ve setup your twitter account , visit this website: TwitStamp.com

Once you’ve customized and fiddled with your shiny new Twitter badge and you deem it satisfactory, simply scroll to the bottom where it says “Use it”. Click the first field that says “HTML”, copy the code, and paste the code, exactly as it is, into your website’s HTML page.

The next time you reload your page, you’ll have a widget displayed, just like it is now, after I inserted the HTML into this blog post.

As you can see, there are a variety of ways in which you can customize your badge, so have fun with it, keep it relevant, and Tweet on!