Category: Website management

Hiring professional designers to build your website can be quite expensive. Normally, you must be prepared to dish out at least a few hundred dollars. All this can change if you know where to find the the best designs for the lowest price.

Here's a general guide:

1. A route that you can take is to design your website yourself. Why waste hundreds of dollars for it, if all you need is some webpage to present informations? Just spend a little time to sit down and do it yourself. You'll be able to design your own sites even if you do not know a single line of HTML code with the help of WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) programs such as Microsoft Frontpage, Macromedia Dreamweaver and so on. Also there are free web editor around. One of the most popular one is NVU.

Here are some important advices if you choose to design your own website:

1) Have a clear and straightforward navigation structure

Provide a straightforward navigation menu so that even a young child will know how to use it. Stay away from complicated Flash based menus or multi-tiered dropdown menus. If your visitors don't know how to navigate, they will leave your site.

2) Have a clear indication to where the visitor is

When a reader is deeply engrossed in browsing your site, make sure he or she know which part of the sitehe or she is in at that moment. That way, the person will be able to browse relevant information or navigate to any section of the site with ease.

3) Do not use splash pages

Splash pages are the first pages you see when you arrive at a website.

4) Do not use excessive banner advertisements

2.You must understand that it is really not economical to get companies to design websites for you. Have you ever seen those advertisements in newspaper or magazine classified ad sections that offer a simple 5-page website at $600? These companies are established companies with large overheads. Therefore they have to increase the amount they charge to pay off some overheads such as office rent, designer's wages, advertising costs and so on.

Generally, a wiser choice is to find freelance web designers. These people are often working from their home so they do not have a high operation cost like that of a company. On the other hand, they will still be able to design images with quality similar to those of designers from big companies.

Please remember to choose freelancers carefully. The best way to do this would be to go to elance.com. There, you can post the abstract of your project and get thousands of freelancers to bid on your project, so you will surely get the best deal. On top of that, you will be able to choose the designers based on their experience, past transactions and ratings, so your value for money is secured.

Well, these are the basics. It is by no means exhaustive. Hope that the article is useful.

Additional resources:

A website checklist
A useful checklist for effective website management.

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