Preparing for your Web Site
When you are going to have a web site created, there are things you can do in advance that will save you time and money once the actual assembly of the site has begun. Even if it is a small site of just a few pages, a little advance preparation can go a long way in getting your site up quickly and efficiently. Your web site is important. Take some time to think about it and write down your ideas.
There are three major aspects of a site
Look & Feel - Content - Function
Look and feel is just for us humans. we need to find our way about your site quickly and easily. However content is what it is all about. It is important to make an impression upon your visitors and hopefully convert a percentage of your web visitors into customers. Still your content needs to be search engine friendly so your site can be indexed to your best advantage. Function is how your web site will integrate into your business and what it will do to help drive sales and increase the awareness your brand.
Look & Feel
Look & Feel is generated by the graphical elements used to bring your pages together visually. Look and Feel also impacts how easily a viewers can navigate through your site and how readily they might buy something. Try to have a rough idea in mind how you want it all to look before you begin things. Take a few minutes and write it down. You will find that writing helps you consolidate your ideas into a coherent whole. If you have been in business a while you probably already have a logo and a Look & Feel. Your web site should use the same colors as your business cards, signage & letterhead. You would be surprised how many times a client has brought us samples of their letterhead & business card--sometimes a web site or brochure too-- and these different marketing arms of their business have no resemblance to each other! When anyone sees anything that has to do with your company, it should be instantly recognizable that it is from your company! Colors, font styles, logo... they should match.
We design sites that fit the clients vision of what they want. When you have an idea of what you want, it saves hours of expensive hunting in the dark and presenting dozens of ideas. Go on-line. Look at web sites you like that have elements you might want in your site. Share these sites with us so we can get an idea of what your visual preferences are.
Think about what impression would you like people get from your site. What impressions about you and/or your business/product are you trying to convey? If you are a NASCAR driver you probably don't want to choose pink and blue. These are things that can be enhanced with careful choice of colors and imagery. So, think about colors. Think about images.
To prepare: Gather your logo. and the colors that you are inclined to use. Find a other web sites with looks and/or features similar to what you would like to have in your web site. Copy and paste a list of those into a file that you can send us.
Content
Content is what the web is all about. Content is what is going to drive your web site and keep people coming back. The content on your site should be optimized for two different audiences: your potential customers and search engines. Both of these are of equal importance. You might have the best content in the world so that everyone who sees it has to buy but if the search engines can't see it and send you no traffic, then you have a problem.
Text
Search engines are blind. They don't know what is in a picture so it is important to have text. But you have to be aware of how the search engines will read and index the text. Let's say you have a web page advertising a "Grand Vacation Hideaway Cabin." The title of the page is just that, "Grand Vacation Hideaway Cabin." In the body text of the page you talk about the great views, the cozy fireplace, the fresh air, and tasteful decor. If there is no mention of "vacations," "cabins" or "Vacation cabins" in the text of the page, it is possible that the search engines might think the page is about "great views" or "cozy fireplaces" so it is important to have an idea of what you want the search engines to see while your write and when you review and edit the page.
You are probably the best person to generate the first draft of the text for your web site since you are the expert in your field. You might want to put together a list of keywords and key-phrases to be echoed throughout your site. We can edit and reorganize your articles with our knowledge of what search engines like. So you have a page that balances the the strength of what people respond to with the limitations of search engine parsing.
Preparing text: Gather any brochures you may already have. Collect any articles or essays you might have written on your product or business. If you have no text of your own, gather other materials you might have concerning your business or product. We can read these and synthesize them into content into your web site. Anything you have in digital form is better.
Images
Even with all of the yammering about text, the Internet, now, is largely a visual medium. it is likely that 50% of the viewers will read less than 10% of the text on your page, therefore it is important to have some pictures. Though there is a world of difference between professional photography and the results you can get from a digital point & shoot there is also a world of difference between the cost. You might not feel the cost is justified until your web site is receiving a lot of traffic and you realize you might increase sales a significant amount with better pictures.
Pictures can have a tremendous impact upon how people react to and view your product. A great set of pictures can be a powerful selling tool. That said, you want to ensure that the great set of pictures you spent time and money on are used to sell & promote your business not someone else's.
One of the downsides of digital content is that it is difficult, if not impossible, to control who uses your content. If you have great text on your site, anyone can copy and paste it into their site. If you have great images anybody can put them onto their site, you can't' stop them. You can find them after the fact and send them a cease and desist letter. But for graphical content, you can discourage them by branding your images.
Here at Planet Chicken, we are big advocates of the brand. Go ahead, put the best images possible on the web, put your brand on them and encourage people to share them. The more your images are shared and passed around, the more people become aware of you and your company. This way your pictures can have double value. once to visitors to your site and again to others with whom they have been shared.
Preparing images: Digital is better. The bigger the file the better. By providing us with large image files we can then crop and optimize your images to create more impact and effectiveness when they are on your site. We like to have at least 600 pixels minimum for the width of any image to start. If your digital camera can spit out big jpeg files let it. If you email your files to use using iPhoto or some other consumer-level photo organizing software, change the settings so it will send us the full-size images or attach them manually to an email (consumer image organizers often automatically reduce your pictures to 600 pixels which is good when sharing them with friends, not so good when sending them to designers) when in doubt you can burn them onto a CD and post them to us.
Videos
With the advent of YouTube.com adding video content to your web site has become another avenue to increase your brand. Although YouTube is somewhat kludgy and has it's issues, people are used to--and seem to accept--it's limitations. It saves you the expense of having to set up your own streaming server. Additionally if is another way to drive traffic to your site. The potential downside is a double-edged sword when your video is finished playing it offers "related" videos which might be those of people in your same line of business. If your videos are better, this is a good thing.
As with images, many of the clients whom we have begun editing their video content. initially uploaded their videos with No Brands. What we said about branding images goes doubly so for videos. At first our clients were putting up rough, uncut videos of their work in progress. They looked just like their competitors. There was no way, when watching the video, of knowing where this video came from. Any company could use anybody else's video.
Brand your videos! We convinced our client to let us edit and brand their video. Now their video is unique, it stands out, with music, & subtitles and opens and closes with the company's logo and contact information. Now their video is an advertising/branding asset. A good video doesn't have to cost thousands. But a few hundreds spent in editing can make a huge difference.
Preparing Video Files: Video files are often too large to email. if you feel confident with FTP we can give you the FTP information for our client upload area. Most often will post them to use on either a CD or a flash card or drive.
Audio
For most web sites, audio is best used either as the soundtrack to a video or a user-chosen option to their experience to your site. There are licensing issues as well when you use the the music of any artist who has not given you written permission. Unless you are connected to the music industry or have videos, audio content will be an unnecessary expense that has the potential to lower the impact and usability of your site.
Preparing Audio files:: In the event that you already have Audio content you would like to include on your web site, you can post, ftp or email us the files in any format you have. We can convert them to MP3 for the Internet.
Flash
With Flash you can build exotic and beautiful content. With flash you can wrap the entire content of a web site into a sexy, stable controlled experience for your user. Unfortunately a site built entirely in flash is invisible to the search engines. So you will have to rely on other means to drive traffic to your site. At Planet Chicken we have serious doubts about the effectiveness of web sites designed entirely in Flash and would feel it would be a disservice to our clientele to offer such. There are other design companies who will be happy to accept you money to design flash sites. At Planet Chicken we feel you should think of your web site as an investment in your business that should be expected to perform and bring you a return. Unless you are investing additional money in paid click-through advertising, SEO or other methods to get traffic to your flash site, you will find yourself with a very pretty site that gets compliments from everyone who sees it. Unfortunately, not too many people will be able to see it.
Flash can be an exceptional addition to a regular web site. With flash you can demonstrate things with moving graphics that might be difficult in words. it is a useful adjunct when used carefully.
Preparing Flash in the event that you already have flash files email them to us. it is more likely that if you need flash we will be generating it for you. in that event we will discuss the content and what will be provided by you and what will be generated by us at that time.
What is is about content again?
Content is important. You probably have a good amount of potential content already, either in your head or in your files. Think about and discuss what you ideally would like to have on your site. If doesn't all have to be there at the beginning. Begin by building a web site that fits your current budget that can expand smoothly to contain everything you want as your cash flow provides. This is the best path to a successful, broad web site.
Function
Function is another one of those fuzzy concepts in web design. For our purposes here we'll use function to mean when your web site takes a programmed action without any interaction from either you or Planet Chicken.
The simplest example of this is the contact form. Every web site should have one. A place where a potential customer can fill out a form and it sends an email to you. Yes, there should be mailto: links as well. To limit spam, the maito links should be disguised to hide them from crawlers that troll the web looking for email addresses. For many sites this might be all of the function that is required.
You might have a restaurant that has Daily Specials. Wouldn't it be nice to have your daily specials for the week show up automatically or at least with little effort? With some forethought, a bit of programming and the right server set up, this is possible too.
Function on a web site can be as simple as the examples above. Function can be more involved too on-line ordering, shopping carts, currency calculators, daily web site updates and automated email notification systems are all possible. Given time and money, whatever you imagine can probably be created. Often, the needs of your business will guide you on how your web site can be enhanced to increase your productivity.
Preparing for functionality: Preparing for this requires nothing more than discussing it with us. We will modify code we have already written or write new code for your use.
And so....
If you have actually read this far, then kudos to you. By now you should have a better idea of how to get ready for your web site. Feel free to call us to discuss the next step to bringing your business on-line.
877-648-8125.
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