Interview with a web designer
Interview with a web designer
Interview with a web designer
Interview with a web designer
I would like a website designed just for me, however I have a few questions
Q1. Would I get to choose the colour scheme?
Yes. At first contact, I always ask a potential client about their preferences in terms of colour scheme, page layout and general appearance. I also ask for links to any websites they like and any they dislike. This gives me a good idea of the general look and feel they would like for their website.
Q2. Would you be able to give me several background choices?
Yes. Once the design criteria have been established, I build a selection of design suggestions from which the client may choose. Of course, they may not like any of them at all, in which case, it's back to the start of the process and approach the design from a different angle. Usually, this is not the case though, and an acceptable design can be agreed from the initial design set.
Q3. Could you design me a professional looking logo?
Naturally! A logo is something that is individual and unique to each client, rather like a signature. Just a simple thing like a logo should speak volumes about what that person's business is, so the shape and colour is very important. It does not necessarily follow that a web designer will be any good at graphic design, but I do both.
Q4. Can I have several pages, such as a contact me, links page etc?
You can have as many pages as you wish. However, more pages equals more time spent on design and build of the pages, which in turn will cost you more. You should strike a balance between enough pages to present your business properly, while keeping within your budget.
Too many meaningless pages are a waste of your money and your site visitors' time; each page should have meaningful content and offer the visitor a reason to stay on the site.
Another important point is not to try and cram too much onto each page simply to save money by reducing the number of pages. If your page is more than three screens in length, the likelihood of the visitor actually scrolling down to the bottom reduces.
Keep your pages to a manageable length, and spread the content over more pages if necessary.
Q5. Will my website carry adverts?
By default, no. Those annoying rotating banner adverts are a money-maker for the site owner, but do nothing to enhance the site visitor's experience. Usually, banner ads are for products un-related to the subject matter of the site you are viewing, so are of little interest.
However, advertising should not be discounted altogether. A discreet, but well placed advert will often improve your search engine ranking, whist generating some additional income for you.
Q6. Will I appear on Google?
Yes, but I can't promise you a specific page or position on Google.
There is an awful lot of misinformation about how Google works and what it does. There are companies out there who trade on this misinformation, offering to take the worry out of Google rankings and promising to get you to the top of page one; these companies are rip-off merchants who take money for doing next to nothing.
The plain truth is that nobody can sell you a Google position; that service is not theirs to sell.
They can get you a top ranking for some obscure search though. Let's assume you have a shop with a red door, and it is located at the north end of the high street. They can get you top billing with anyone who searches for shops with red doors at north end of high street', but what use is that? You will be in a class by yourself, but it won't find you any new customers.
If your shop sells dog collars, you need to be listed among other dog collar shops, not shops with red doors; preferably near the top of page one. Your position will be determined by the quality of your website coding, and the quality of the links to your website (rather than the quantity), and the placement of keywords and keyphrases in your text, among many other factors.
Q7. Will I own the design copyright?
Yes, once paid for, the design is yours. This will be reflected in the copyright notice at the bottom of the page,
As a point of interest, copyright is assumed and not registered. You don't have to take your design to a lawyer to get it registered; that would apply for registering a trade mark, which is something else. As long as you have created a unique piece of work, you automatically hold the copyright because you created it. As you can imagine, this makes proving copyright ownership in a courtroom very difficult, should things ever get that far.
Q8. What will my web address be?
You web address, more correctly called your URL (Uniform Resource Locator) can be anything you wish. It doesn't exist until you create it, so you can have anything you choose. The only criteria are that it is unique, so if it already exists somewhere else, you can't register it. However, you can choose a variant of the name you originally wanted instead.
Q9. Will I have an email address?
Yes, indeed. You will probably already have an email address anyway, that you use for your day-to-day contacts, but your website will get its own unique email address as well. Your incoming emails can be re-directed to your regular address if you wish, or you can operate your new email address independently.
Q10. Can you host my website for me and if so how much will it cost?
Yes, I host several of the websites I have designed. It is not strictly necessary that your website is hosted by me though, and you are free to host it elsewhere if you wish. The charge for this is in line with most other hosting providers at 2.50 per month, payable annually in advance.
Q11. How much will the design cost?
My time is charged out at an hourly rate, and I work out how many hours the design will take. I always under-estimate the time required though, because I am a bit of a perfectionist and I take ages fiddling with designs. I see no reason for a client to pay for this little idiosyncrasy of mine, so I always spend much longer on a design than you will pay for.
In general though, you can assume a final cost of about 50 per page, although that will vary with the number of pages you want. A single page will carry all of the design costs, so will be more expensive, at about 90, while a ten page site will end up at around 40 - 45 per page because the design costs will be spread over more pages.
Q12. Will my website be unique?
Yes. I don't rip-off' anyone else's designs; I may adopt ideas that I have seen elsewhere, but that's all. I think all designers are influenced in some way by things they have seen before; the same would be true of musicians and painters too. People spend years at art school learning the techniques of Da Vinci, and will aspire to emulate him, but in the end, their work will be original to them. The same is true of my designs; I see what others have done, work out how they did it, and then adapt that technique to suit my purpose.
Your website will be as unique as your personality or your fingerprint.
Q13. Will all the pictures on my site be legal or licensed to use?
If you intend to provide me with images, you can either let me have some that you have taken yourself, or you can buy them from an online image library, like istockphoto.com. Istock sell the rights to their images, so you can use them within the licensing agreement; alternatively you could get free images from freefoto.com, or some other legitimate image source, but you would have to credit the photographer with a link or a name-check.
More of the misinformation about Google here; people seem to think that just because Google provide an image search, it is OK to copy an image from someone else's website and use it on theirs. Wrong! If you didn't obtain it legitimately or create it yourself, it isn't yours to use.
Q14. How long will it take to design my website?
As I said before, I take longer than I really need to design a website because I am a perfectionist. I can usually create an initial design in a day or two, but that may be less if you give me a clearly defined idea of what you want at the outset. If you give me a free hand to design anything I think you will like, I could take up to 3 days to design something.
As a rule of thumb though, the design phase is generally two days.
Let's be clear though; this is design we're talking about, which isn't the whole process by a long shot. The time lapse from starting a project to putting in up online as a complete website is more like 7 to 10 days! That takes into account design, image acquisition and editing, graphic art, page layout design, page coding and the other possible add-ons like flash movies and action scripting, javascript menus ( those fancy, animated menus), and maybe a nice image gallery. All of those things take time too, so there is a lot more to creating a website than just design'.
Q15. I have heard about keywords what are they and do I need them?
More Google misinformation coming up!
Keywords' are words or phrases that your potential site visitors would type into a search engine in order to find you. Remember, they don't know you exist yet, so you have to put yourself in their position and think about what you would type if you were looking for a business like yours. Once you have your keywords, they need to be worked into your page text, so they appear often without being over-used. A really strong keyword will occur 4 or 5 times in a page.
Those keywords are then written into a separate area of your web page which you don't usually see, called the head' section. In the head, there are meta-tags' which define what the page is going to do and how it is going to do it, and part of the meta-tag set is the Keywords.
Now, about a year ago, Google announced Keywords are dead! ; they said that they would no longer include keywords in search criteria. I was sceptical, and ignored the announcement; I have always just followed the best practice guidelines for web page design, which require that keywords are used.
Recently though, I built a website for a client, and accidentally deleted the keyword meta-tags. It was about 10 days before I realised what I had done, but guess what?... Google had indexed the website anyway, and there it was, sitting at number one for the search criteria I had specified.
OK, I went back in and inserted the keywords that I had overwritten, but it didn't make any difference to the website's performance; it worked equally well with or without specified keywords.
So, a keyword is a keyword, whether you specify it as such in the meta tags or not; as long as it appears frequently enough in the page, Google seems to work out that it is a keyword anyway.
Oh.and words like and', the' and it' don't count, Google is smart enough to ignore those.
Q16. Is there anything else I should know that I haven't already asked?
When entering into a contract with a web designer, you should be sure to establish exactly what the designer will do and not do. There are designers and developers, and while most people assume that they do the same jobs, they don't; there is a clear distinction between them.
Think of the medical profession; you have doctors and surgeons. A doctor knows a bit of everything and is pretty good that the usual medical stuff, while a surgeon is an expert in a specific field of medicine. Same thing with web people; designers are suited to the design and creation of websites, while developers are the guys who create the computer programs that the designers use. The developers are the surgeons who make the internet work, while the designers make the best use of what the developers create.
Ask lots of questions!
Make sure that your designer will produce a website that is validated by the W3C.
OK, explanation: The W3C is the World Wide Web Consortium; they are the body of experts who define what code can be used in a website, how it should be used and where. If your designer doesn't follow the rules, your website may not display correctly on everyone's computer, and your website's search engine rankings will suffer. You can easily check the validation of any website by visiting http://validator.w3.org/ and typing or pasting a web page address into the box provided. Click the Validate' button and see the results; you will be amazed at how many websites fail validation.
All of my original designs are fully validated, which explains in part, why they rank highly in search engine results. You will find a W3C validation logo at the bottom of every page I build.
Remember, Google is not the only search engine out there! Ask if your designer will register your website with other search engines as well, ie. Bing, Ask, Yahoo etc.
Don't be drawn into quick-fix' deals with companies who specialize in SEO (Search Engine Optimisation); any decent web designer will include full SEO in a newly built website anyway. Basically, if your chosen designer doesn't optimise your website, they might as well not bother building it at all!
You should approach your website creation as a partnership; a meeting of minds between your vision as a client and the designers ability to bring your vision to life.
If you work together, you can create something that both the client and designer will be proud of.
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