Like any professional service, website design is one that’s not always easy to judge before you actually sample it. Sure, you can look at someone’s portfolio but you have no way of knowing how much of the design was down to the designer and how much was insisted on by the client. So what should you ask your website designer to stand a better chance of getting a well designed website?
1. Do you do the design work by yourself or with a team?
There’s advantages and disadvantages whichever way this one is answered. But it may give you a clue as to how big the firm you’re working with really is. Sometimes a one-man band can bring better results than a collaborative effort and often this is more down to your personal preference as a client.
2. Will the pages you design validate and work in all browsers?
This is a biggie. There are standards for HTML and CSS that should be adhered to. As Microsoft have gradually made their Internet Explorer browser more compliant with these standards, a lot of sites have been caught out because they were designing their pages to take account of the idiosyncracies of Internet Explorer rather than work on all modern browsers. A good designer can make your pages look near enough identical regardless of the browser or operating system your customers are using. A bad designer will produce a page that goes haywire if it’s not viewed on the precise combination that they designed it in.
3. Will I be able to change the pages myself if I need to?
This may well strike dread into your designer’s heart but it shouldn’t! After all, you may want to add an extra service or remove an item you no longer offer. This is probably a two minute job that’s as quick for you to do as it is for you to explain to your web designer. It’s no good if it takes weeks of to-ing and fro-ing to get small changes made to your site. Any blustering could mean that either your potential designer is a control freak or that their code is so messy it would take you a month of Sundays to work your way round it. Some designers can’t even modify their own pages – scary thought, but one I’ve met before.
4. Will the site be installed on my web hosting?
This is another biggie. Too often, your website designer will want to host your site on their servers and hold you to ransom if you want to move or change anything. It may cost you slightly more initially but you’ll have more peace of mind if you can install the site they’ve designed on a website host that you have control over and access to. You can always allow your designer in to that space as well, but you’re in overall control. This is much better than finding out in six or twelve months time that your website designer has skipped town with a stack of unpaid bills and your beautifully designed site has been consigned to the digital garbage.
Membership sites are rage these days. Just Google any term with a potential market and you will find numerous sites selling tutorials and information on the topic. Creating a membership site can give you a headache, but with right tools in your arsenal it can be as easy as opening a diet coke. The most preferred tool in this niche is Wishlist member.
Wishlist member is the fastest way to turn WordPress into a membership site making it the ultimate WordPress membership solution available. Wishlist member uses WordPress as the core content management system and create a highly simplified but perfect solution for creating an online membership site. With Wishlist member it is utterly simple to control user’s access to the content of your membership site. You can also accept payments and manage your members just from a single dashboard.
It is powerful membership software that integrates flawlessly with WordPress and its powerful membership script can turn any WordPress blog into a fully functional membership site. The best thing about Wishlist member is that it is very easy to use. All you have to do is just unzip the files before uploading them to your WordPress blog and you will get a membership site up and running. This whole procedure will take less than five minutes and you need not be a tech geek to understand it, it is so simple.
Wishlist member comes with tons of features to take care of all your needs. The first feature is its ability to provide unlimited membership levels within one membership site. let us suppose that you created an online tutorial program for c++ programming language and you divided it into three sets viz beginner, intermediate and expert. This feat can easily be achieved with Wishlist member. With Wishlist member you can have as many membership levels as you want in your site. So if you want- basic, intermediate and expert levels to be separate, you can achieve it with one, or a few, clicks. This feature allows you to charge more for a higher level of access within the same site without having to buy any additional software.
The best thing about Wishlist member is its easy and simple installation with a new or even an existing wordpress blog. It hardly matters that you want to convert your existing blog into a membership site or want to start a new blog with membership site; both feats are as simple as opening a diet coke bottle. You need not possess any technical skills for that purpose because installation procedure of Wishlist member is a breeze. All you have to do is just unzip the file, upload to the plug-in folder of your wordpress blog and activate it.
Another superb feature packed within Wishlist member is its ability to provide flexible membership options. If you want to give a free trial to your blog subscribers, there is an option for this. If you want to give a paid trial like- try my product in just $5 for 7 days, there is an option for this. Not necessary to say that it performs its main function of paid membership in a jaw dropping manner. You also have option to combine the above three options for your prospects.
If you are looking to set up a website for your business or products then there are some basic rules of thumb that you should follow when designing if you are hoping that it will help you to generate revenue. The most effective website designs will be the product of several well thought out strategies who’s goal is to drive traffic to the site. With that in mind here are a few simple to follow guidelines you should follow when putting your site together.
Any textual content which is displayed on your site must be well written, informative, exhaustive and presented in a manner which is easy to understand and not cluttered with technical jargon. As an example one of the big disadvantages of a high street shop over an internet shop is that the product can be directly accessed by the shoppers so they can see and examine it first hand. To overcome this shortfall, an internet shop should concisely describe it’s products in a manner which highlights the benefits the user is likely to derive from the purchase.
The overall look and feel of your website is extremely important as the first impression it makes will determine whether your visitors will stick around and continuie browsing. If the interface isn’t immediately obvious or it doesn’t appear intuitive to use then the user will unlikely be motivated to read further. Any colours an images must be inkeeping with the overall theme of the business and should not detract or interfere with the presentation of the text.
For every page that exists on the site there should be a brief summary of the information contained on that page along with a page title that concisely describes the page’s content. Not only will this make the page easier for the user to read, but it will help the search engines to determine what your site is about and index the page appropriately.
Just as information should be presented clearly on your site, the manner in which the user can navigate the various pages on the site should be equally clear. If for any reason a visitor has difficulty in finding their way round your site then you will run the risk of visitors simply leaving your site. It is important to remember that the attention span of people browsing in the internet is extremely short and if they are unable to grasp the working of your site immediately then you may as well not have a website.
With this in mind it is important that your website should load quickly. Only put as much text on your page as you need, try to keep the filesize of images down and try to avoid using large flash files.
Finally, make sure that you incorporate any contact details in the design of the site. You could have hundreds of people visiting the site each day, however if they have no means of contacting you directly then you will be shooting yourself in the foot!
