Web Designer vs. Desktop Publisher

As I’ve mentioned before, I’m a web designer. I live in Port Elizabeth, South Africa. My company’s name is Black Alsatian.
Yes this post is in a way to shamelessly punt my own business, but it is also in the hope that someone would read it before getting a web designer to build a website for them.You can just do a search on Google for web designer, and literally millions of results get returned. Yeah working on the web, we all try to get our piece of the pie.
The unfortunate thing is that there are so many of the guys out there, proclaiming themselves as web developers, but in fact they don’t know much more than what they can accomplish in Adobe Dreamweaver^TM or Microsoft Frontpage^TM.

Yes, there is actually a bit more to it than just making the website look pretty. I have been shocked by some of the work I have seen by guys here in PE.

Yes fine, so you have a website, it looks damn nice, but, how about the following:

• how long does it take to load (keeping in mind, there ARE still people using dial-up connections)
• how long does it take to load between pages
• can you find your website on Google (not by typing the domain name, but by searching for your particular product or service)
• do you have one of those animated Adobe Flash^TM intro pages?

If you are stuck with any of the above, you need to seriously have a chat with your web designer. It means your site is not doing what it’s supposed to do.

Pages taking long to load, means either the graphics aren’t optimised properly or the coding behind it is not to standard, or both!
Taking long to load between pages, see the above.
Can’t find your site on Google? There are actually companies that specialise in just optimising your site for the search engines. It’s called Search Engine Optimisation. These companies can charge you phenomenal fees, but if your web designer is worth his buck, you shouldn’t have to take this measure.
It is never a good idea to have a Flash^TM intro page. Even though Google now claims to be able to read Flash^TM files, it’s still a fairly new technology. There are ways to optimise it, but it’s still no guarantee.

So, in short, things to look out for, websites for R100 per month or R1000 setup, R200 per month thereafter. These guys normally just take the same template and re-use it over and over. That’s how they manage to do it for so cheap, because they don’t put the time into it.

If you are in the market and unsure, contact me and we can have a chat. I might even convince you to not get a website at the end of the day. I do web design as well as web hosting.
Happy internet marketing!

In: On the Web

Tags: dreamweaver, Google, port elizabeth, search engine optimisation, SEO, South Africa, web design, Web Designer, web developer, web hosting