The Advantages of Professional Web Design vs Doing it Yourself
You’ve probably got ideas running through your head about what you want to go on YOUR site, but the next choice is, who will create your site?
The two options
1) Hire someone to create your site.
2) Do it yourself.
OK firstly lets look at the idea of you creating your site.
There are many sites out there, that can help you to build without the need for learning any code, for example, http://www.doyourownsite.co.uk/ or http://www.webs.com/ or http://www.moonfruit.com/ .
Building your own site will Save you Money, and it will give you a great sense of achievement watching your site appear before you. However, depending on how you decide to create your site, you will need to learn about how to design a site, and then how to promote it afterwards, in order to make it work for you. A big positive is You can use your own ideas. You don’t have to try and explain to a web designer, how you want your site to look like.
Choosing a designer has its advantages.
You may have your ideas about what you want on the site and how you want it to look, but the designer has more experience about what does and doesn’t work. It sounds strange but just choosing a different site colour and logo could stop someone from leaving your site immediately, a designer can help with this.
Getting professional help may include SEO (search engine optimisation) preparing your site ready for Google and the other search engines to help get a better ranking. You can do this yourself, and my facebook page and this blog will offer ideas of you can, however it can be very time consuming so do you have the time?
OK so a designer will cost you money, and that amount may vary depending on who you get to do it. As with anything else I suggest you get some quotes. If you’re a new start up company or a sole trader then you budget is likely to be tight, (This is where Pippas Web comes in). So the cheaper option of doing it yourself may appeal, but weigh this up against the time it will take you, to learn to do and to promote your site. This is all time that may we be better spent doing what you know best, running your business, and let the designers do what they do.
Happy Customer – Freelance Proofreader Claire Arnold BA (Hons)
I’ve not really added my own testimonials yet, tending to rely more on visual examples of my work than peoples’ responses. But this week I received a wonderful testimonial that I thought I should share with you.
In a world where my computer guesses what word I want to use and then tells me how to spell it, a whole host of arguments between me and my spell checker about the differences between spellings in the USA and the UK just add to my confusion.
Now let me introduce you to Claire Arnold BA (Hons), who is a Freelance Proofreader.
A proofreader is someone who will read your documents, your website; indeed, anything you write, including checking it for errors and, most importantly, give you the corrections. (Personally, I usually get my poor hubby to read my posts or pages before they go live to get him to pick up the worst, but he doesn’t have that much interest in what I’m writing.)
The documents can be essays or dissertation for students, company documents or advertising. Documents can be paper (hard copy), digital or even online. Even websites and blogs can corrected before going live.
I’ve been helping Claire make some small changes to her website to get it ready for customers and hopefully optimising it ready for Google to find and list it.
This is what Claire has to say.
“I recently employed Pippa’s services for help with my website. I was extremely happy with the professional, friendly service I received. She was always there with brilliant advice and suggestions, as well as making amendments to my site that greatly improved all aspects of my site. I would not hesitate to recommend her for her skills in web design, as well as fantastic customer service.”
If you’re interested in using Claire’s proofreading services, she has kindly made the following discounted offer:
*If you mention “pippasweb” when you contact Claire, you will receive 25% off.
Customer: Claire Arnold – Proofreader.
Service: Current Site – Update.
Site: http://www.proofreaderpro.moonfruit.com/
To see how Pippasweb could help your business, check us out.
Small Changes.
Well over the last few weeks I’ve been taking an online course in CSS. It has helped to clarify what I had tried to work out for myself before hand. Since then I have been working on a couple of sites including the Pippas Web site and the cricket club site which I maintain.
Pippas Web was made true CSS coding not part CSS and part tables, with just a little tidy up while I was there. I do plan to re-write some sections soon.
The other site I have updated with new colours and finally caught up with some of the missing results and entrants for the competitions.
Neither site has been changed radically, but for me it was more about trying to tidy up behind the scene’s, practising some new skills and making some good looking sites.
If anyone has any comments about them, please do let me know.
Pippas web is launched
As of the the very early hours of Wed morning the full Pippas Web site is now live. Woo hoo. Having tested it in the test folder, I then had a couple of glitches with links not working fully. However they were easily corrected and the site was open for business.
Ok so for now there’s not too much I can do to advertise as it looks like we might be moving soon, so for now I’m trying to spread the word of the site by handing out cards, emailing people and leaving messages on social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.
Also I going away for a few days, visiting family with my children, so it’ll give a few days for the word to start to spread.
SEO Pippas Web Style
I also made the decision to not offer the full SEO service which is rather time consuming for a one woman outfit, but to offer a “lite” SEO which will give people a good start by including the following SEO techniques during the design process.
Unique meta Titles in the code behind the page.
Description for each page will be unique and keyword rich.
Completing keywords for each page, making them relevant to the page not only the whole site.Ok so this won’t get people to the number one slot, but if it’s done at the beginning then at least it’s a good start. This will all be included as part of the web design process. However once the site has gone live, I will offer a carry on service. Providing information from Google analytics and making suggestions about any changes that could be made or places to list etc. but on a very small scale.
Setting the prices to charge.
Well the task of the last few days has been to try and establish my price list for Pippas Web. This is harder than I thought. My target audience is sole traders, probably just starting out not making mega amounts of money, but wanting a website. They’re not technically minded and therefore have no interest in designing the site themselves. Also as I’m self taught and continually learning new skills I feel bad charging too much. But then if I want to do Pippas web instead of going back to work, then I need to be making enough money. Especially as it looks like a move to Stafford is now likely.
As I offer both HTML coded sites and Flash templated sites, I needed to do this twice over. Flash site are easier to complete so I decided to charge a slightly lower amount for those sites.
I’ve also seen some people taking the mickey in my humble opinion charging £50 just for handing over the password for a Flash templated site using the same site as I do. Where in actuality if the customer wanted they could have set it all up themselves for free.
Well the price list is now set. Once the site and blog goes live, then I can see if I’ve priced too high or too low.
Designing My Own Site
Well I thought I ought to start documenting the development of my site Pippas web as this was the purpose of adding a blog to the site.
I’ve been working on trying to get the layout right before finalising the content. I decided to use CSS (Cascading Style Sheets), which was a bit of a challenge for me as I’d not used them before, but that is how I learn. I decide to do something, then have to work out how to do it.
So far I’ve gone from having a plain background to having a picture background with fixed width site then I know that most people will see the site the same way. I’ve had to learn how to make small flash movies for the side of the site, how to use CSS and a crash course in how to edit images using Paint.net . Not to mention joining up to twitter. No wonder every time I go on the computer just to do a little tweaking it takes me hours.
