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Website Design & Maintenance

All You Need To Know About Website Design And Maintenance!

 

Welcome to the exciting world of website design, where creativity, originality and out-of-the-box thinking, rules! In this article, we're going to cover everything from web design basics to some useful info on how you need to maintain your website. So shut yourself in your room, grab a cup of coffee, and get set for an absorbing journey into the animated world of web design!

 

What should you know about web design and maintenance?

website design and maintenance are services which are offered by web design companies. website design can be of many types and is basically determined by the requirement outlined by you as well as the budget for the website.

 

website design and maintenance go hand in hand. It is unlikely that you will get a website designed and not make changes or update it for a long time. It is for these changes and updates that you need the website maintenance services. Many design companies can offer you a package for website design and maintenance.

 

This helps you pay a single price for a combination of services. Most business organizations prefer a one time package cost rather than pay ongoing maintenance services charges for their website.

Such a website design and maintenance package can provide the general services of website design as outlined by you and a certain number of maintenance hours on the website over a period of one year. Some companies may even include domain registration and hosting within their website design and maintenance packages.

 

 

General package

Though a general package deal of website design and maintenance is recommended, it might not be suitable for all business types. For example, if you plan to have an active website where frequent updates and changes are required, the general maintenance package will not be suitable.

 

The design company may also not offer a website design and maintenance package to you in such circumstances. Maintenance for such a website would have to be either done via self-service module which is part of the website or you might have to pay for the number of hours that the design company spends on the maintenance of the site.

 

Today website design and maintenance are services which are required by almost all types of organizations. As a web design company it is recommended that good and practical packages for website design and maintenance are created to attract customers.

 

Most customers do not like to be bothered with the nitty-gritty’s of website design and maintenance and would like to have their design agency take care of it. Here are some practical tips on how to create good website design and maintenance packages for your customers:

 

Services

List down all the services which are included in your website design and maintenance package. Customers are most likely to compare the website design and maintenance packages of different providers and thus you are more likely to win over the customer if you can be as detailed as possible.

 

Hidden costs

Make sure that there are no hidden costs in your website design and maintenance package. Customers dislike receiving invoices for services after a deal has already been made and thus might reduce the goodwill you command as a website design and maintenance company. If there are any recurring costs, then it is best to let the customer know it up front.

 

Flexibility

Let there be add-ons to the basic package of website design and maintenance which a customer can choose from. This allows flexibility to the customer as well as helps create confidence on your services. Since most customers are not sure of the activities required to design a website, it is recommended that your marketing literature explains the same in simple layman’s language.

website design and maintenance services, if delivered well can help develop a steady revenue stream since customers like to stay with one agency for as long as possible. Services for website design and maintenance are likely to stay in demand as long as the internet is there!

 

First up, let’s run through some of the basics of website design:

 

Here are a few things you need to ask yourself, *before* you actually design your website: What is the point of this site? What are your goals and the image you want to portray? Who’s your intended audience?

 

For instance, are you targeting fashion-conscious teenagers, aged 16-19? Or are you promoting revolutionary fax machines to small-medium entrepreneurs? Whoever it is, make sure you design your website to cater to your target market.

 

Then comes the technology factor. You might have to do some guess work here, but you still need to give it sufficient thought. For example, how will your audience view your website?

 

When considering speed, you also need to think about browsers and plug-ins. Really, what makes more sense for the purpose of your website? Look, you won’t need RealAudio, Java or Shockwave, if you only want to post pictures of book covers, right? On the other hand, these programs may come in handy if you want to impress your audience with fancy-shmancy graphics and animation!

 

OK, now that we’ve got that out of the way, it’s time to focus on the nitty-gritty!

 

  • Make sure you create your website so it’s viewable at 800 x 600 resolution: - Many web designers out there have computers that can display higher resolutions like 1280 x 1024 or 1024 x 786. So they tend to design their web pages to fit into their resolution.

 

However, when someone with a computer that can display only a maximum of 800 x 600 visits that page, he’ll have to scroll right down to view the page properly.

 
 
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Scrolling web pages from top to bottom (vertically) is fine, as long you make sure it doesn’t exceed two and a half pages or so. But scrolling horizontally is not only extremely annoying, it’ll discourage folks from visiting your site again. And that’s something you don’t want happening, do you?

Try to keep the structure of your web pages consistent throughout your website:- For some weird reason, a few web designers get bored with what they’re doing, and decide to create a different structure to their web pages within the same site! While one page may have the navigation menu across the top of the page, another page may have it along the left side! It makes things way easier for your visitors, if your web pages are consistent. It’s why all Windows applications have the same look and feel; the same goes for Mac programs too.

Use standard design styles for your navigation: Sometimes, we web designers may be tempted to experiment with a cool and funky navigational system for our websites. However, you need to avoid this at all costs. It only annoys and confuses people, and prompts them to leave your site in disgust.

Why not create a site map for your site? A site map is a simple and easy- to-create web page, with links to all the sub-pages of a website, organized in proper categories. Research has proved that visitors will hang around longer to explore your site, if they can use a site map to navigate from one page to another.

Do try and keep your web page under 60k in size: Web pages can consist of text, multimedia content like QuickTime video and Flash movies and images (JPEG, GIF, PNG, etc.) When you add up the combined sizes of all these elements in kilobytes, you get the total size of kilobytes a visitor will have to download, to view the entire page.

If someone has to wait over 25 seconds to see your page, you could easily lose out on thousands of potential customers.Even though high-speed Internet is growing at a rapid pace, the majority of surfers worldwide, are still on 56k dial-up modems. This means you may see a huge drop in traffic if your web pages are over 60k.

Don’t attempt to center everything on your web pages: - Let’s face it. Centered text on pages is just plain hard to read! Left justified text is usually the way to go. If you really want to, you can enter major headlines or something similar, but do it very sparingly.
 

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