Why do I Need a Website? How to Design & Promote a Website?

The question that bothers many entrepreneurs, corporate executives, sounds exactly as you read the title “Why do I need a website? How do I design and promote my website online?” Today, a worldwide network for faster Internet is gaining its momentum. Now even the expression would be appropriate: “If you are not on the Internet then you are not in business.” I think it would be wise to agree with with it.

In this article I would like to answer those and other frequently asked questions. In particular, I would like to cover the following questions: Do I need a website? How much does a website cost? How do I find a web designer (webmaster)? What are the requirements for a website design? Stages of development. What is Search Engine Optimization and and how do I make my website visible online through Internet Promotion.

Do I need a website?

Judge for yourself:

• On your own website you can share the most important information about yourself, your company and activities that will help your partners or customers to find you and choose you as their prefered business partner. At the same time, you will promote your own image online and show your visitors that you strive to keep up with the times, which is a very important deciding factor in choosing a business partner for your company;
• On your business or personal website you can post regularly updated news, information, product catalog and other information. Every new visitor to your site is a your potential customer. The more you can attract visitors, the more likely that the number of your customers will increase;
• The more visitors you get to your site, the more people know about your company, products and services.
• The site is a unique opportunity to unload your company employees and liberate them from finding solutions to too many questions, at the same saving their time for more important tasks and liabilities.
• The site provides an additional opportunity to attract your target audience. You can use contextual advertising on search engines.
• In general, if you have a website and do your best to keep it up-to-date, you can find a considerable amount of evidence in favor of the use of the site in your business.

How much does a website cost?

The cost of developing a web site will be different from each web studio or individual designers (webmasters). The decisive role is played by different factors, both objective and subjective. The former includes the presence and quantity of the desired material, the required level of programming, individual approach, presence / absence of clear guidance on the project and many other factors. In my article “What Information Do I Need Before I Design a Website?” you can read about a few features on which your website’s price will be dependant.

The second includes the professionalism of the selected website designer, his reputation and the cost of his time. Equally important is what result do you expect. In principle, to design your own website you can do so for free, really, and with your own efforts! But if you want a serious web resource, it is better to rely on the fact that you have to spend money on it.

How do I find a web designer (webmaster)?

Today it is not so difficult to find a programmer that would meet all your needs and whims. In the end, you can search for freelance designer, but there is a chance that the work will not be performed accurately. Much safer to ask for help in web studio, such as Vital Webmaster, LLC. In this case, all you have to do is to define your requirements by answering a few questions in our Website Order Form.

What are the requirements for the website design?

First of all, you need a website that should work correctly with the major browsers: Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera.

If you have already decided on your website’s requirements, such as what kind of a website you need: corporate , online store, business card or some other option, at the same time you should choose a content management system  (CMS), which will greatly facilitate and accelerate the creation of a resource and its continued operation.  It is very difficult to create a website so that it properly displayed in all four browsers (not to mention others – less well-known), especially in IE. However, if you do not find a suitable cms, company our Utah based company, Vital Webmaster, LLC allows the use of different frameworks for the design of a unique content management systems, which are ideal for your particular individual case.

Stages of development

You probably already decided to create a website, thereby making the first step towards improving the image of your company and most importantly taking your business to a new level. So, the website design project was implemented with minimal cost and with maximum effect, the process of website development costs is divided into several website design stages.

If you choose Vital Webmaster, LLC as the site developer, we ensure its continued support, refinement and performance monitoring. Such services are provided within a month after the complete project has been delivered to you and FREE of charge. At the end of the free service period, we provide paid services to support your site by doing work at affordable prices. Vital Webmaster, LLC never leaves its clients in trouble! Please review our “Website Maintenance” services page for more details. Website maintenance is a very important step in keeping your website up-to-date. Please read more about “Website Maintenance” to understand the types of support and maintenance that webmasters can provide.

Creative Meeting & Concept Design

The first and most important stage of development is outlining the requirements. If at this stage you do not clearly define the technical specifications and do not take care of the main points of your project development (such as: financial issues, deadlines, etc), to further regulate the process would be extremely difficult, and most likely, you will spend a lot of money down the drain. Make sure that you clearly know what you need, and try to prepare as much as possible details such as examples of your favorite sites, content that will be present on the website, sections, how many and what are the menu items, and so on. Some companies provide specially compiled questionnaires, such as this one, that have the required fields where the information you enter is all they need to design your web resource. In this case, you simply need to fill out their questionnaire and send submit it to their website. Usually this stage requires around 8 to 15 days.

During this phase your design company presents the concept outline and schedule for a new website. You provide to your designer all available content items (images, text, files, media etc.) at this time. Once agreed on the outline the design process takes place. At this stage it is necessary to find out:

• The intended audience,
• How big should be the site from the point of view of the client,
• Structure of the website (sitemap)

Development and Approval of Website Design

Immediately after the creation of the basic concept of the website, a second stage of development of website design is followed. Some customers sometimes offer their design, and this, of course, significantly speeds up work on the project. If you have your design, or you have no idea about the design, check out other similar sites and pay attention to their appearance and design, select a few options you like, and enter them in the questionnaire. I should mention ??of the possibility of buying the finished design template that has certain advantages. This step can take anywhere from 2-3 days (if you provide your own design) or up to 2-3 weeks for a website designer to come-up with the design.

During the design process you provide very specific feedback to the designer and the designer offers to the client visual and navigational ideas of a new website resource.

Review & Publishing of the Website on the Internet

Before proceeding to this step, you need to solve for yourself two more tasks:

• selection of website address (domain) and
• the choice of the physical location of the site.

In fact, the publishing of a website on the Internet means that the files of your site should be placed on any server and be constantly available to each visitor. Alternatively this can be explained as follows:

• Does anyone have a server that is always connected to the Internet?
• Does the server offer “hosting” services?
• What are the features of the hosting?
• Is the server safe? More information about website security can be found in “Web Security” section.

Typically, web design companies, such as Vital Webmaster, LLC, provide assistance in choosing hosting and domain name for your new website. At this phase you need to provide approval to go forward and post your website live.

Once you reviewed and agreed to post the website live, your designer will publish your website on the Internet using the hosting information you have provided to your designer. Any changes after this phase will be made if necessary according to the agreement which should have been put together between you and your designer prior the design project.

Filling Content

All of the above will not make sense if the site will not perform one of the most important functions – to provide visitors with information about you and your services. This same function performs content on your website. There are two main ways of acquiring content you can write it yourself, or ask for copywriters. Personally, I prefer the first, since you know best what needs to be on your website. However, this does not mean that you should not use the services of copywriters, but should be extremely careful when choosing the writers. You may need to pre-screen them to see how well they know a given topic related to your website. Also you can use ready-made articles on the theme you want, or order them for your website. Choice is yours, but keep in mind that content is the most important factor driving the number of visitors to your site, as well as thanks to the content on your website the conversion of visitors is high – that is, how many of your visitors in the future will become your customers.

Website Support

Under the website support is meant how often you update your content, as well as some changes that you want to make in the future on your site. The more often you are upgrading the site and its content is more useful than the more active it is seen by search engines, and hence its level of indexation increases significantly, so it becomes more affordable for its target audience, and therefore, the closer the achievement of our original goal, and that is to attract potential customers to your business.

Internet Promotion and Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

After long and painful way of designing and creating the site is completed you can enjoy the results of the site. However, there is a great likelihood that your joy may be not so long if you do not take another step, which also can not be so simple. The fact that many people naively believe that by creating a website, you can stay visible for a long time is misleading.

It is important not to forget that the main idea of the site is to attract customers, and hence (as we have already mentioned this), the site should be accessible to everyone. That is the goal of the search engines optimization, which implies to a whole range of tasks and procedures aimed at ensuring to bringing your website to the top ten at the request of the major search engines such as Google, Yahoo, Bing, and many others.

Ideally optimization should start while working on the creation of the project – so-called internal optimization – code checking for compliance with required standards and for errors, correct URLs, internal linking correctness, the site structure, regularly updated content and so forth. In our services section we outlined basic SEO Design Process which helps to understand basic steps for SEO. External Search Engine Optimization implies a registration of the site in various directories, search engines and purchasing links and contextual advertising, such as Google Pay-per-Click program.

Basically, I tried very briefly describe the essence of search engine optimization, which should not be underestimated.

So now I hope you learned something new about how to approach the creation of a website, the stages of development of the site and about what to look for when selecting a website design company or a webmaster and much more.

If you need a website, and you do not know who to turn to, the company Vital Webmaster, LLC is happy to provide you with their services.