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Award winning SEM agency bigmouthmedia hires Senior Search Strategist from iProspect
Bigmouthmedia has appointed Karin McLean to the newly created role of Operations Manager, McLean was previously Search Strategist at Massachusetts-based Search Marketing firm iProspect.
The appointment marks another significant growth phase...
Diabolical Design
© 2004, John Calder http://www.TheEzine.net You can find guides and tips on good web site design everywhere. In 1998, Vincent Flanders co-authored a book with a unique twist. It was called "Web Pages That Suck", and Mr. Flanders followed that with...
How to Analyze Your Web Site Traffic
How to Analyze Your Web Site Traffic (Part 1 of a 3 Part Series) Copyright 2002 by Herman Drost Getting traffic to your web site without analyzing it, is like being blindfolded in a crowd. You hear voices, but you don’t know which direction they...
How To Boost Traffic To Your Blog: SEO for Bloggers
Let search engine index your blog and let people come to your fresh blog. Though you're in World Wide Web, nobody knows you're there. You need to pull kindly those who are potentially waiting for you but don't know where your are. This objective is...
How to Design a Search Engine Friendly Web Site
Many web site designers don't design their sites for the search engines. This is a huge mistake because they miss out on attracting lots of free traffic. Your beautifully designed web site may have cost you thousands of dollars but it still...
Recent Cell Phone Advancements
Cell phones have come a long way since the early days of the 1980s when they were the size of a brick and weighed almost as much. Today, cellular phones come with built-in cameras, polyphonic ringtones, and high-tech games. New 3G mobile phones...
Understanding HTML
HTML is a relatively simple language, in some places it is
almost completely readable and understandable but that doesn't
stop people from having problems with it. Why is that? It's
mainly because, while the HTML tags themselves are...
Using the Web Accessibility Toolbar
Testing a website for accessibility can be a time-consuming and laborious process. The free Web Accessibility Toolbar can do most of the hard work for you though and is an indispensable tool for anyone interested in accessibility.
The toolbar...
Web-site designing Pillars (part1)
WEB-SITE DESIGNING PILLIARS (part1) ------------------------------------------------------------ copyright (c) Pavel Lenshin ------------------------------------------------------------ It is a hot opinion that "it's the words that sell,...
XHTML -Making the Switch
XHTML or the Extensible Hypertext Markup Language is an extension to HTML made by the w3c. XHTML is a cleaner, neater, generally faster version of HTML. Here are some things you cannot do with XHTML: Dreamweaver, Frontpage, etc. GOODBYE!!! Never use...
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Hiring Professionals: 5 Things to Look For
So you've decided that it might be best to leave web design to
the professionals, have you? Well, the unfortunate thing about
web design professionals is that not all of them are exactly
professional. Some of them are working from wildly out of date
knowledge, and, well, some of them are working from their
parents' basement.
How can you protect yourself when you decide to hire a
professional? Well, here are some guidelines.
Qualifications are Meaningless
Web design is a new enough industry that what qualifications
there are have ended up being largely stupid and meaningless.
I've never met a good designer who has a qualification in web
design - a qualification in proper graphical design is, of
course, something else entirely. You can guarantee that most
people with web design qualifications did them at a community
college to try and get rich during the dot-com boom. These
people know nothing about web design.
What you should pay attention to when you're looking at web
designers is which of their skills they think are important. If
they're marketing their Flash expertise to you, you probably
don't want to hire them. If they can competently explain what
XHTML and CSS are and why they're good for your website, then
they're a better candidate.
The Portfolio
The easiest way to tell whether the designer you're considering
is any good or not is to take a look at their portfolio. Good
designers will have a diverse portfolio, with plenty of
attractive sites that they've built for all sorts of customers,
and they'll be able to explain to you why they built each site
the way they did.
If the designer doesn't have a substantial portfolio yet, you
shouldn't write them off there and then - but do say that you're
going to need to see something before you commit yourself. A
good designer will happily do a first-draft design for one of
your pages just to show themselves off. If you're happy with
what they've done, then the chances are that they've got the
rest of the design in their head, ready to code up and send to
you.
Usability is Vital
You should make sure that the designer you're talking to
realises that they're
building your website for users - all
users, no matter how they want to use it or which web browser
they have. Amateur web designers have a tendency to come up with
things that they think are impressive-looking, either visually
or technically, while ignoring who the website is actually for -
your visitors.
Some questions to ask the designer include: Which browsers are
you going to test with? (They should reply with 'as many as
possible'). What is the purpose of my website? (They should be
able to explain the point of the site simply).
Setting a Price
Many web designers simply have no idea what kind of price to
charge for their services. If you post a project to a freelance
site where designers can bid on it, you'll get bids ranging from
$50 to $5,000. Both ends are pretty obviously ridiculous. At one
end, you've got kids with no experience and Indians who don't
speak English; at the other, you're paying pointless committees
to have meetings for a week.
Your best bet is to find someone professional but independent,
experienced but not corporate, and with a price that reflects
the quality of their portfolio. As with all things in life,
though, don't be afraid to negotiate - and never agree to let
them do however much work it takes and pay by the hour.
Hosting Offers
Finally, beware of web designers who are trying to sell you a
whole package, together with a domain name, web hosting, and the
rest. Operations like this are almost always flawed in one area
or the other, since designers aren't really very technical
people on the whole. They'll either be web hosting specialists
who think design is so easy anyone can do it, or they'll be
designers who are reselling some cheap hosting package for a
premium. On the web, it's better to buy hosting yourself.
About the author:
Original Source: Eclipse-Articles.com -
Serving over 25,000 Articles.
Information supplied and written by Lee Asher of Eclipse Domain
Services
Domain Names, Hosting, Traffic and Email Solutions.
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