Expectations

We always make sure our clients have the proper expectations for their website. One of the most unrealistic most first time website owners have is that the moment their website is launched they will be listed on Google on the first page. In fact, it takes a little bit of time to come up even for your own company name – it isn’t immediate.
Another huge expectation is that by simply having a website up means that business will flow in. Just having a website is not web marketing – you still need to get your website in front of people to attract new visitors.

Responsibilities

We can’t do everything for your website – although we’ll certainly try so the process is as easy as possible for our clients. Depending on the project scope, clients may need to provide the website outline, content, images and other materials. There is always an emphasis on getting these materials together sooner rather than later as 98% of the projects that take longer than expected are a direct result of our clients not being able to collect materials on time.

Timelines

We like to make sure that every client knows what we’re doing for their website and when to expect to see deliverables. We feel it’s important, especially for the first timers, to have a good understanding of the whole website process and how long things can take. We like to establish a base timeline for things like when the first design comp will be available, when the HTML templates will be built, when the content management system will be setup, etc.

Of course, a web design timeline is fluid. Going back to repsonsibilities, a timeline can easily get extended when clients don’t provide materials in a timely manner or something unexpected comes up on our end with another project.

Effective Communication

With all communication, it goes both ways. Often times we will request materials from a client and not hear anything for several weeks. It really helps the web designer to coordinate multliple projects when there is at least an estimated time to receive materials. For us, we are obsessive about working efficiently as we like to respond to client requests as quickly as possible (and ideally within a few minutes of receiving the request – yes, I said minutes, not days). If we know when we will have what we need to move the project along, it helps every project we are working on including yours.

Another important aspect of effective communication during the web design and development process is to make questions or concerns known as soon as possible. In some cases, we’ve had a client who kept quiet about their approved design concepts missing a key element they were hoping for. They thought we would implement as we were building the site. Not until we were moments away from launching the site did they chime in about the missing element. It was no problem for us to go back and fix it, but this pushed the website launch back several days and could easily have been avoided. Our goal here at Level Eight is to make sure you are absolutely happy with what we are creating for you so if something is off definitely say something. We’re more than happy to make things perfect for you.

One mistake we’ve seen on some websites is an overly complicated web form. In particular, we’ve seen some forms ask for some really unnecessary information. For example, if someone has a general question about your businesses services, why would you require them to provide their address? Many people see this as asking for very private, sensitive information. As a result, they may be likely not to fill out the form at all.

When putting together a form, think about what the minimal pieces of information you need from the user. Do you really need a person’s address to answer a simple question from a prospective new customer? 99% of the time – no. In general, you want to make your form as simple as possible for a user to fill out as this will make it much more likely the user will fill out the form.

However, there are instances where you want to collect a lot of information from a person without trading emails. This is the reason we have a general contact form. The general contact form is much more simple – this is to be used for general questions. The website quote form is intended for people who know they want a website and are ready to get a cost estimate. In order for us to give an accurate cost estimate, we need to know all that information in the form.

So as you build your forms, make sure not to over complicate them or you risk losing potential new customers. This goes with anything on a website – the more complicated the less likely it will work.

What is a Website Content Management System?

A Content Management System (CMS) is a web-based program or application that allows you to create, edit and manage your website content. A web designer can create a custom design for you and then integrate it as a “theme” or “template” for the CMS being used. Most of the data or content for your website is stored in a database instead of flat files (multiple HTML files linked together). A CMS website is sometimes called a “dynamic website” because the data is being stored in a database and not using flat files.

With a CMS comes more advanced functionality than a flat file website. Some typical features include a news/blogging tool, contact forms, simple file/image uploading, user roles or permissions, photo galleries, etc.

How a Website Content Management System can help

With a Content Management System, you as a client can make updates to your own website without the need to call a “web guy”. Usually we get clients who ask for a CMS because they have finally become tired of their web guy taking way too long to make simple text changes to their website. Another positive is that the cost to maintain your website goes down since you are doing the regular content maintenance. Instead of paying a web guy an hourly fee for updates, you make the updates yourself and they get published immediately. With the right CMS and the proper instruction from your web developer, your CMS should be very simple to use and make updates.

Which Website Content Management System is best?

Each website has unique requirements so not every CMS is right for every project. You first need to analyze your needs and what is most important for your website. With those requirements, a web developer should be able to select the proper solution for you. In our experience, we have found the open source community to be a great fit for most of our clients. When certain website requirements are very specific to a client’s needs, we will implement a custom solution. However, we have found that WordPress seems to be the one solution we come back to time and time again. I’ll be adding another blog post in the near future about our experiences with WordPress and why we always seem to choose it as the best solution for our clients.

So do you need a Website Content Management System?

Here is what we always ask our prospective clients when they ask us about a CMS:

• Are you planning on making updates more than once a month?
• Do you ever have time sensitive updates that require immediate publishing?
• Are you comfortable paying more upfront but saving money on hourly updates over time?

If you answer “yes” to any of these questions, than a CMS might be a great fit for you. If you only have a small, brochure type website with content that changes on a very infrequent basis then the additional cost to setup a CMS may not really be warranted.

First, Web 2.0 is an adjective – not a noun. It isn’t a thing. I use it to describe two different areas: Design and Development.

A web design is considered “Web 2.0? by having a focus on usability – this usually means a clean, simple interface that doesn’t add unnecessary graphics for the sole purpose of looking pretty. As such, many of our website designs get called “Web 2.0? designs. We actively strive to create designs which are goal driven and simple for people to find the information they want (or, make it easy for users to see the information we want them to see).

For web development, the term “Web 2.0? general describes programming that is “agile”. Many programming languages have adapted code structures which allow them to create web data applications very quickly. Essentially do this by making common code libraries for the most common things. This means developers don’t have to rewrite the same code for every single website. Things like user profiles, login systems, etc. are already setup and a programmer just needs to build on top of that core system. Saving time (and money) makes the development process agile and thus “Web 2.0?.

Type of Company

There are many different kind of web design companies ranging from 1 person doing everything to 150 employees. Having worked for a larger company, I know that things go much, much slower and often cost a lot more (they have to pay for all those employees and office space!). If a large company is offering something on the cheap, it is likely because they make money on quantity, not quality. They mass produce websites and thus likely mass produce terrible websites.

If you find a freelancer, be aware that one person is responsible for everything. This means should he/she get really busy, then your project timeline will start to stretch out. Should that person be away on vacation, you’re pretty much hung out to dry until they return. The other downside is that many freelancers have their main job and then do websites on the side.

Level Eight is a mix between a large company and a freelancer – although all the web stuff is handled by me and business stuff handled by Gemma, we do have trusted people who are exceptional at design, development and copyrighting which we bring in on a regular basis whenever the project requires it. As a result, we have the advantage of being able to handle every aspect of a website from small content websites to large-scale development projects. We also take care the extra stuff beyond just making your website like web hosting, email setup, print design, etc.

Location

In the web industry, location is not really a factor. We have had clients from everywhere in the UK and even international. Phone, email, instant messaging, and video conferencing really makes location a non-factor when deciding which company to choose. Even when we have local clients, we typically don’t ever meet in person. Quite honestly it is typically a lot more time spent driving to meetings than what is actually accomplished at the meetings.

Experience

Has the company you are looking for developed a similar website that you are hoping to have created? If not, they may not know some of the intricacies of your specific situation. Now this shouldn’t be a deal breaker, especially if the company has a lot of experience in general – they’ll likely be able to plan for these unexpected things to come up and know exactly how to deal with them. We’ve worked on many, many types of projects. We understand what it’s going to take to put together what you are looking for. Because of that experience, we can provide you many different options to accomplish your ultimate goal.

Reputation & Customer Service

Speak with some past clients, see what they say about the company. Customer service is an important aspect of this industry – after all, we are creating websites for you not for us. At Level Eight, we are very happy to be able to say you could contact any client in our portfolio and we know they would say good things about us. Our #1 goal is to make sure every one of our clients is very happy with not only their website but their experience in working with us.

Cost

Everyone is worried about cost. However, in this industry our experience is that you get what you pay for. As mentioned, there are cheap companies that mass produce websites for £200 each with poor customer support and quality. There are companies that can create e-commerce solutions for £20,000 because they can custom create every aspect of the system to meet your exact needs. Talk to several companies and see what their price is and what they recommend is the best approach to accomplish what you are looking for. Take into consideration the type of company, experience, reputation and customer service.

We are not the cheapest company to work for, but we’re definitely not the most expensive. If you have a budget, we’ll work with you to find a solution that can work within it. We aren’t out to milk every pound out of your pocket, we want to be able to provide you a quality solution that you can afford. If you’re interested, request a free quote from us and see how we stack up.

So what is the difference between graphic and web design?

The first difference is the most obvious – a physical piece compared to a digital piece on a computer screen. With graphic design, you end up with a physical piece like a brochure or business card while a website is on a computer screen. With a print piece, a person looks at it, reads it and that’s it. With a website, the user can interact by clicking links, filling out forms, etc. A web designer needs to make sure that all elements of a website are usable – meaning people don’t get confused about how to interact with the website. A graphic designer never needs to worry about this except for making sure any text is legible.

Graphic and web design have very different restrictions. Graphic design is usually limited by the size of the brochure, business card, etc. and the designer knows exactly how to accommodate a design into his restrictions. With a website, every visitor views it from their unique setup of operating system, browser and monitor size meaning there are literally hundreds of variations a web designer needs to consider. A web design needs to be built using HTML so it renders in browsers properly and there are design decisions that need to be made because not every design can be built into a website. Also, when the site is built, if it is overly graphic it may require a lot of images and thus a long download time for users – something that causes poor usability and thus a poor website.

Here at Level Eight, we are web designers first and graphic designers second. Do we offer graphic design services? Yes, but typically only to our web design clients who like working with us and are comfortable with our process. We also tend to price our graphic design projects accordingly since it is not our primary service.