nthdegree Website Design

Phase 1 of any website is to pick a theme. If you already have a logo, we can use that for the color scheme and fonts. We also have to decide what to say, what do you want to say to your website visitors? If yours is a business website, who are your customers likely to be and why should they buy from you?

Website Development

Phase 2 is the nuts and bolts, picking a technology ( is standard HTML enough or is ASP,NET a better choice? ( some developers use PHP which stands for Personal Home Page, nuff said )). Does the website need to store data, if so, does it need a full fledged database or will a simple XML file be sufficient? Should the website have Flash or will a few pictures be sufficient to make the website attractive? Sorry about the technical jargon, but you would be amazed by how many people call themselves website developers, yet do not understand these terms or their implications, who cannot go past HTML and a little CSS. Speaking of CSS, we always use it, a lot.

Website Optimization for Google, Yahoo and MSN

Phase 3 is optimizing your website so that people can find you using Google, Yahoo and MSN ( there are others but these 3 cover about 95% of your potential website visitors ). Unless your website visitors already know about you, this phase can be the most important. ( Actually, Phase 2 and Phase 3 should overlap ). Phase 3 is about Keywords and Links. The Designer needs to define what the Keywords will be ( for example, some keywords for this website are "Website Design", "eCommerce" and "Video Recording" ), the Developer needs to put emphasis on the Keywords so Google knows which words are Keywords, that "eCommerce" is a Keyword but "database" is not. Links are the next step, some links help your website ranking, others hurt it. ( website rank determines where your website shows up when someone searches for the Keywords using Google, Yahoo and MSN, whether your website is on the first page or the 23rd page, obviously you would like to be at the top of the first page but your competition has other ideas. )

An important part of optimization is making sure your website is free of syntax errors. HTML is a language, like English it has rules. If you break the English rules too badly, people won't understand you or they will ignore you. The same applies to Google and Yahoo, if your website is riddled with errors, you cannot expect Google to find your Keywords or give you a good search rank.

Website Promotion can be important when you have lots of competition. For example, you have a restaurant in Enfield, there are hundreds of restaurants in the Enfield area and many websites that review restaurants. You want the Yahoo website dedicated to restaurants to list you, hopefully with a 5-Star rating. We can go to Yahoo and Chow.com and review your restaurant. Of course if you are a financial planner or a medical doctor, there are similar websites specific to your profession that you want to be listed on. You can do it yourself, but who will believe you when you review yourself? It might also be nice to have more than one review. This type of promotion is another service we offer.

Website Maintenance & Hosting

The amount of maintenance a website requires varies by type of business. If you own a restaurant, your website is likely to require a lot of maintenance. Seasonal menu changes, price changes and holiday specials should all be posted; this is obvious. Less obvious is that frequent website changes imply that a website is "important". Google says that "important" websites should get higher search ranking. Most of our websites come with a "light" maintenance agreement, we believe that making a few changes every month is appropriate for your website to attain search rank.

Hosting is about more than price, its about service. Unless you want to test your website every day to see that it works, you want a reliable hosting service that actually checks each website daily. If you have email at your domain, hosting reliability is doubly important. Missing emails can severely hurt your business, or if yours is a personal website, your personal life. We recently implemented a free service for the websites we host to check that your home page is accessible daily. If you wish to have every page checked hourly, we can do that for a nominal fee. We also supply a Google Analytics monthly report to most customers, please ask about this service.

Questions about all of this?

Then please stop by our office and talk to us.