Here's a little information about the development process.

Initial query:

This is the first step, where you contact us. It's helpful if you have a rough idea what you want, let us know the purpose of the intended site and so forth.

Storyboard:

Once we have a rough idea what your needs our whole team will discuss ideas and talk about the contributions we can all put in where appropriate. We will, of course, build your site around your company logo and colours. We may also use methods such as brain storming trees to gain more in-depth information about what you require from us and from your website. We then discuss our ideas with you, talking about what you like or dislike about the plan we came up with and make changes where needed.

First build:

While we put together the first build of your site, we request that you get together photographs and all the information you want on the site. We can re-write it into a different style to suit your websites if needed and resize or edit your pictures for you to keep the flow of the website.

First review:

This is where you can give us feedback on the site as we have it so far, detailing what you like, dislike, want kept and want changed.

Second build:

We get the chance to implement any changes you requested and clean up the site. You get the chance to review it again after this and if you're happy with it, the build is finished.
At this point we can provide you with a hard copy of your site on CDROM to do with what you please. We will also keep a copy, just in case you loose your copy and need it in the future, or require us to do maintenance work on the website in the future. 

Hosting:

Once the site is finished, you'll want it on the internet, and we can deal with hosting and getting you a registered domain name.

Pricing:

As every site varies, it's not really possible to give a rough price until we've spoken to you about your needs. As we are still in training though, we don't expect people to be willing to pay what a professional web designer would charge (which is anything from £15 ($30US) to £25 ($50US) p/h). The prices we charge cover the amount of electric it costs to run our systems whilst making the websites (including the communication costs). It also covers the price of CDROMs and sending them, and any other information to you via post. On larger or more technical websites we charge a small fee to cover the extra time spend developing them.

Advertising:

Something we would like to add is the advertisement of your website. A website can be a valuable ‘tool’ or ‘extension’ to a growing or established company, when advertised properly. Business cards printed out with your new website address (and e-mail address if required), a flyer/poster in your store or business HQ and registering your website with Google, Yahoo and other search engines online will all help to advertise your new website with, hopefully, good results.

In addition, in some cases, websites may need to be updated on a regular weekly/monthly/bimonthly period. This is something we can talk about and hopefully come to some agreement on us doing it for you.

We hope this has cleared things up for you, but if you have any more questions, please feel free to contact us.

 

Points to remember:

  • It's often better to keep bright colours to a minimum; these are often quite harsh on the eyes and will put people off staying on your site too long. Some colours aren't necessarily the best together either, for example, reds and greens together can cause problems for people who are colour-blind and wouldn't be able to make out much of your site.
  • Take time in choosing the pictures you want on your website. Choosing clear and appropriately sized pictures will benefit you greatly, particularly if you are selling products/livestock. We find we gain the best results from pictures that are ¼ - ½ their original size, linked to the full sized picture. This allows viewers on your website to choose to see the full picture, should they want to, without compromising quality in the smaller pictures. This is, of course, something we can assist with.
  • Check text and then check it again. While we will check spellings and grammar and often rewrite (with your permission) the text given to us to suit the site, it is your job to make sure facts and information is correct and true at the time it is given to us.
  • Large blocks of text put people off. So if you are writing the text content you (without our input) should keep this in mind. Paragraph text properly and keep it all tied together well. Making sure the correct content is on the correct pages.