I Need a Website! Guide for New Clients

This document is a non-technical guide to help clients of designers like myself understand what is involved in creating a website for their company or organization. It will explain some of the technical decisions that need to be made, but also many of the content and design decisions that many people do not initially consider.

This document is intended to guide people through the creation of small websites with the help of designer like myself. By “small website” I mean less than a dozen pages, with simple functionality such as sharing business information, displaying a few images, a map to your store, and a video or two.

The process I describe here requires you the following things to happen:

  1. Pick a domain
  2. Create content
  3. Decide on a style
  4. Have the website published
  5. Hand-off the website for future edits and improvements
  6. Understand the costs

While it sounds like a lot of work, it’s actually about the same as putting together and printing a decent brochure.

Pick a Domain

Arguably one of the most important long term decisions in creating a website is picking its domain name. The domain is the address that you type in to your web browser to visit a website. www.example.com is a domain. The .com is the top level domain (TLD), which indicates that this website is a commercial websites based in the United States. Other TLD’s include .net, .org, and country specific ones such as .ca for Canada and .com.mx for Mexico (which are more expensive and harder to get than .com).

Picking a domain name can be fun. It can be the name of your company, or something equally memorable. It’s best to avoid any more than three words, dashes, and starting names with numbers. For an auto-body shop named 3rd Street Auto Body, www.thirdstreetautobody.com would be preferable to www.3rd-street-autobody.com.

Many domains are already taken, so you may have to get creative in picking a good, short name. You can use an online tool called whois to see if a domain is available to buy, and who owns it already if your choice is taken. The website DomainTools can be used to see which domains are available, and which are taken. Pick an available domain name, tell your designer, and they will purchase it along with a hosting package (more on that later).

Create Content

The text and images of your website are referred to as content, while the look, feel, and interaction of your website are referred to as style. We’ll discuss style later, as it’s the most time consuming and expertise-demanding of the steps.

Usually, when you hire someone to create your website, they deliver both the technical development of the website, as well as the styling.  Sometimes it’s a good idea to hire a graphic designer with web experience to develop the style. The client is often tasked with writing out the actual meat and potatoes of the website – the content.

The best way to share your ideas for content is to create a content map. The content map would describe each page, its title, and what sort of information you’d want on that page. For example, this is a rough content map for a restaurant website:

The terms header and footer are used to indicate the information that is on the top of every page (header), and at the bottom of every page (footer).

The content map would not include the actual text on the pages, just the organization of what information is available. The actual text of the page is referred to as the copy. It is usually not recommended to get the designer of the website to write the copy, but instead have the designer proof and suggest changes to the copy that the client writes.

Decide on a Style

Deciding on a style is the most difficult part of creating a website. You may have strong ideas about how you want your website to look and feel based on competitor’s websites, your favourite websites, or general design preferences. It is best to share those very early in the process. Provide examples and sketches if you can. In my experience, the style of a website takes up as much as three-quarters of the time of the whole website creation process.

In additional to being challenging from a graphic design perspective, it’s technically challenging for the designer to actually implement. One of the major challenges is making the website “look” the same in the different web browsers. Most experienced designers avoid technical and usability pitfalls by following established web design conventions, which they will discuss with you in the process of working on the style of your website.

Deciding on a style requires you to come to a consensus on a variety of things, many of which work together to give your website a unique and characteristic style.

After you share you design preferences, the designer will get back to you with a complete web page style. Alterations and suggestions can then be made. Usually another style iteration happens once the content is plugged in and you see how everything looks and feels.

There are hundreds of design considerations in deciding on a design, and the designers experience will shine through at this stage. For example, they may consider internationalization – How will the website support both English and Spanish speaking visitors? They will have experience with accessibility – If your audience is primarily older business people, the design will likely be different than if your audience is young video gamers.

Feel free to share your questions and concerns with your designer – there is a lot to decide on, and ultimately it’s your website, so don’t let the designer run away with it!

Publishing the Website

The process of putting everything on the web, accessible via the domain, is referred to as publishing. Publishing requires a couple of things to happen:

Once a website is published, usually the deliverable product of the website designer is complete, and the website is yours. At this point it is available to the rest of the world, as well.

Support for a website after it has been published varies from designer to designer. Most designers are more than happy to support the website once it has been published. Many will offer a long term support contract that includes work that inevitably comes up after a website is live for a few months.

Edits and Improvements

Years ago, websites were static things that you had to update manually in painstaking, user-unfriendly ways. Modern website design make the process of editing content, adding new pages, and changing the style easy enough that you don’t need to involve the designer once it’s all set up.

The way this is accomplished is through a tool called a content management system, or CMS. CMS software includes Wordpress, Drupal, and MovableType. These tools offer a friendly face to all of the typical things that you’d need to do with your website: make edits to content, create new pages, moderate guest comments, upload new images, add video, and so on.

Setting up a website in this way is typically more initially expensive, but well worth it. In my experience, within weeks of launching a website, clients come up with new content, new ideas for pages, and need to make changes. They email the web site designer with their ideas, who tells them they’d gladly oblige, but the client will be charged an hourly wage for the changes as it’s outside of the scope of the deliverable.

If you can make the changes yourself, you’re more likely to actually make the website do what you need it to do. Always insist that your website is based on modern CMS like Wordpress or Drupal. All of the websites I design are based on CMS. Once a CMS is chosen, you often have many, high quality pre-designed layout choices. Search for “Wordpress themes” in Google to see the vast array of website layouts available.

Costs and Pricing

Websites I design are typically delivered under a fixed-cost contract, with a specified delivery date, and a fixed number of meetings (with fixed dates). I start all business with a meeting to discuss your needs, followed by a quotation. If the quote is satisfactory, work begins upon the receipt of a purchase order from the client.

A typical 4 to 5 page website for a small business can be delivered within a month, with four meetings taking place: one to discuss the clients needs, one to discuss content, one to demonstrate the first style design, and a second style meeting before publishing the website.

Costs are typically calculated using an hourly wage, with a discount for a complete website. My rates for technical, style, consulting, and graphic design work are $USD 65/hr, and $USD 40/hr for other work (ex. meetings, proofing content, entering content).

That would include 40 hours charged labour, four or five meetings, with copy written by the client. The cost is then calculated, and discounted. For the scenario discussed, the cost may be $USD 1800. The cost of the domain, and hosting is included in that fee. The following year, the client will be billed again for the cost of the domain and the hosting (approximately $120/yr).

Great! How do we Start?

If you’re interested in having me design your website, feel free to contact me. I look forward to hearing from you, and hope this guide has been helpful and informative.

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