In any small business website design project, the planning phase is the most critical. If you’re working with a website designer, it’s essential that you communicate your vision clearly so that the designer can make your vision a reality. And the designer must communicate her vision too, providing clear examples, ideas, and images that will help you understand what the site will look like once it’s completed.
There are three basic components to any design: the design itself (look and feel of the site), content (text and images that will appear on the site), and functionality (how it works).
As you work with your designer, you need to keep all of these components in mind. Additionally, there will be a learning curve for both of you as your designer studies the nature of your business in order to reflect it appropriately in your design and as you learn about the many options available to you in terms of how your business will be presented to an online audience.
Throughout the planning process, clear communication is key to building a good relationship with your designer and to your designer building a great site for you.
I thought I’d share some basic small business website design tips that will help you work with a designer to hammer out the details of your design plan. By working as a team with a shared goal and by focusing on communications and smart planning strategies, you and your website designer can build a stellar website together.
Website Design Tips to Help You Get Through the Planning Process
1. You Don’t Need a Vision — Most designers are thrilled when a client gives them complete creative control over a design project. If you’re not sure which direction to take in terms of design, consider giving the designer some leeway. Tip: Ask for samples to make sure you like the designer’s work, and pay special attention to the designer’s own sites since they’ll offer a good example of her style.
2. Use Examples — Nothing is clearer than a visual example. Spend some time surfing the web and find different website designs that appeal to you. Be sure to scroll through the pages and note what you do and don’t like. Collect a few URLs (links) and then send them to the designer with your thoughts about each one. Tip: Start with your competitors, but branch out into other fields too.
3. Don’t Overdo It — If you send your designer 100 examples, there’s going to be a lot of confusion. Shoot for sending your designer three to five examples of designs that you like with notes highlighting what appeals to you and why.
4. State What You Want — Be specific about what you like and what you want. If you send your designer three links to sites you like that are all extremely different from one another, she’s not going to be able to figure out which elements you like best unless you communicate your preferences to her. Offer comments about each site’s design. Do you like the colors? The layout? Does the site boast features that you’d like to see on your site? Is the content similar to yours?
5. Mention Your Dislikes — If there’s a design element you’ve seen but don’t like, make sure you let your designer know about it lest she use it on your site!
Avoiding Feature Creep
Try not to engage in feature creep. What’s that?, you ask (I’m so glad you asked). Feature creep is when you see the final design for the first time and suddenly come up with a bunch of new ideas that were not included in your original project scope and expect the designer to add these features to your project at no additional charge.
Examples of feature creep are as follows: Actually, I think I would like a form on the contact page after all. I know I said I didn’t want a blog on my site, but now I do. Those colors just aren’t working for me. Oh, by the way, while you were working on the site, I had a new logo made. Most feature creep requests are followed by a statement like, That’ll only take a minute or two, right?
It’s that last statement that qualifies a request as feature creep. Most designers do expect a project to expand a little as it unfolds and will build that into the price, but any big, time-consuming add-on (as well as a bunch of little add-ons) will incur additional fees. If you do want to make some serious changes, you should be upfront with your designer, because trust me, your designer wants you to be a very happy and satisfied customer. Just be aware that some post-design adjustments may show up on your final invoice.
Teamwork
Like any true professional, a website designer wants you to be pleased with the final product. But since it’s your website, you have an important role in explaining what you want your site to look like. As long as you communicate clearly and openly with your designer (and encourage her to do the same), the design process will flow smoothly and your website will come out looking exactly the way you want.
WordPress is quite possibly the best thing that has happened to websites since the Internet itself.
If you ask someone what WordPress is, there’s a good chance they’ll tell you that it’s a blog platform, but it’s so much more than that.
Since it first hit the web in 2003 as a blog application, WordPress has evolved into a fully functioning content management system. It stores your content, keeps it organized, and makes your website easy to manage and navigate. Best of all, it’s free.
For those of us who once coded websites by typing HTML by hand, WordPress is a monumental blessing. It doesn’t have the same restrictions and complications that programs like FrontPage or Dreamweaver present because it uses code instead of a WYSIWYG format. In non-technical terms, that means it’s highly customizable and flexible enough that a website designer can take full control of the design and layout while simultaneously giving consideration to the content.
About WordPress
Most website hosting providers offer one-click installation for WordPress. That means once you’ve signed up for hosting, getting WordPress installed on your website is just a click away. Only a few, outdated hosting providers still require manual installation, which involves uploading the WordPress files and database to the server on which the site is hosted.
The code and files include instructions that tell a browser how to display the WordPress website on the screen. This is done through WordPress themes, which are templates that drive the design and layout of each site.
The content of a WordPress site is managed online, from the WordPress control panel, which is as easy to use as web-based email. From the control panel, you can compose pages for your site as well as blog posts, and add media including text, images, audio, and video.
WordPress Themes
Often, people are turned off when they hear words like “themes” and “templates.” But WordPress themes can be customized to the point that they don’t even resemble the original look and feel, and there are an enormous variety of themes available.
Most people want a completely original and unique website, especially if they want their business to stand out from the crowd, so it’s understandable that themes or templates don’t sound too appealing. However, there are a number of benefits to using these themes on a website.
For example, many themes have certain standardized components. A navigation menu across the top of a website, a clickable header, and sidebars are familiar to website visitors and make them feel at home. This makes any website easy to navigate and therefore more attractive to visitors.
Also, since the themes are so customizable, it’s entirely possible to strip down a theme and make it look completely different. You can even start with your own design, find a theme that loosely resembles it, and then tweak the theme to match what you have in mind. Or, you can choose a theme you like and tweak it until it has a look and feel that satisfies you.
Some of the available themes are premium, and these you must pay for. However, most themes are free. Many premium themes are available via license through designers who have purchased the right to customize and resell the themes. If you have considerable HTML and CSS skills, you can learn how to customize a WordPress theme quickly and easily on your own. And if you don’t have those skills, you can simply hire someone to do it for you. Chances are, it will be a lot cheaper than hiring a website designer to code your site from scratch.
Problems with Traditional Websites
Traditional websites, which are coded with HTML, present a host of problems and frustrations for business owners:
- If you don’t know how to code your own site, you have to hire someone to do it for you, which means every time you need to make a change or update (no matter how small), you’re reliant on someone else. And you have to pay for it.
- Large amounts of content can be difficult to manage, add to a site, and keep track of without some kind of content management system.
- Small changes to a site’s structure could be costly and time-consuming. For example, you may need to change your URL structure to optimize the site for better search engine performance. That could be tedious and expensive for a larger site that’s not running on any kind of database.
- Designing a site from scratch without a theme or template costs more than customizing a theme because it takes a lot longer.
- It’s difficult to switch designers once your site is up and running. Because a WordPress site uses a theme, if your designer is unavailable or unsatisfactory, you can easily find another who can update your site for you.
WordPress Benefits
WordPress solves many of the problems presented by traditionally coded websites:
- Once your WordPress theme customization is complete and your site is launched, you (or any of your employees) can quickly and easily add content or make changes. It’s literally as easy as composing email.
- WordPress uses a database to manage all of your content, and through the WordPress control panel, you can view and manage that content with great ease.
- With WordPress, changing the URL structure, for example, is just a matter of renaming pages or categories, and that can be done in a matter of minutes.
- Because the site’s design starts from a theme and most coding is done by amending the style sheet, a WordPress website will probably be a lot less expensive than sites rendered the old-fashioned way. The code is already there and it just has to be customized.
- Once your site is up and running, anyone with knowledge of WordPress and themes can make changes to your design or content. This can be done from within the control panel.
In addition to solving problems that traditional website design presents, WordPress offers a host of perks:
- Plugins like All in One SEO make keyword optimization a breeze, and are easy to learn.
- Other plugins make website management much easier. Google Analytics plugin automatically installs on every single page of the site.
- Still more plugins make the site attractive to visitors, especially when your site includes a blog.
- WordPress tells you which other websites are linking to yours.
- Using categories and the blog feature, you can generate categorized blog posts or articles, which is a great way to communicate with your customers, connect with other professionals, demonstrate your expertise, establish credibility, build transparency, and generate content that will help your site perform well on search engines.
Small Business Website Design and WordPress
Of course, there are plenty of other content management systems out there and WordPress is not appropriate for all situations. Mammoth sites might need a more powerful (and costly) system. WordPress is ideal for small to medium sized websites and may even be appropriate for some large, content-oriented sites.
One of my favorite things about WordPress is that it allows you to grow your site so easily. I can continually add content, and WordPress handles it seamlessly. I don’t have to keep track of all my files, file naming conventions, folders, and directories. WordPress handles all that for me.
I also appreciate being able to update my site from any computer with an Internet connection as well as from my mobile phone. That definitely comes in handy.
In any small business website design project, the planning phase is the most critical. If you’re working with a website designer, it’s essential that you communicate your vision clearly so that the designer can make your vision a reality. And the designer must communicate her vision too, providing clear examples, ideas, and images that will help you understand what the site will look like once it’s completed.
