Computersight -

Designing a new website can be an expensive and quite extensive business. Putting in careful thought and consideration as much as possible during the website design and development process. For those of you lucky to be blessed with good design skills then you would have already thought up of an idea as to how your website would look like when completed, although you do need to bear in mind the practicality of any designs.

Ask yourself the following questions:

• Will is work the way intended when it has been developed into a fully functioning website?
• Will it be easy to use?
• Who are the target audience?
• How often will I need to change the design?

By taking the above questions into account, you are able to produce a more effective and therefore a design that works with a lot more gusto than those designs that look excellent, but have hardly any functional content space.

Be prepared to lose some design elements during the development phase of your website. This can be for many reasons, including practical ones, which will enable you to be able to produce a much better website, even if the final design isn’t quite what you had hoped for. Of course there are ways to be able to develop sites that include every single one of their design elements, but these will not typically be the most attractive to end users. End users like to see a mixture of both good design and excellent functionality! If it comes down to having to choose between an end user feature, and a design element, in a majority of cases a tastefully developed end user feature can keep customers coming back 20 times more than a well chosen design element.

If you are not blessed with the ability to be able to design your own websites, much the same position as I find myself in, then you still need to go through the above process, but you need to be able to communicate this to a designer that will be capable of delivering what you expect. When you sign a contract with one of these designers, I would look at the terms of the contract, and aim to get a contract whereby if you are not satisfied with the work you have received then you are not liable for the cost of any time or materials. This will protect you and incentives the designers to produce their best work.

Once you have a fully completed design, then you can start looking at the ways in which you would like your target audience to interact with your website there can be many things, including blogs, photo galleries, polls, and general content. Working with content on websites is something that has many facets to it. Making sure that everything works with all of the search engines, is optimized to the correct level, makes content on each page a tricky one.

Working on many different ways to get users to interact with your website is crucial to keeping your website popular and ensuring that people carry on returning to look at what you are placing on the website.

One of the important things that you need to consider before you develop a website is security. Do your programming well, and you won’t suffer with individuals and rivals attempting to destroy your website, and stop you from working online.

Once you have a design, then you do need to start looking at the best way forward for your website. Look at things like interaction, as mentioned above, along with little things like how the website is going to pay for itself, and whether or not you’ll have to subsidize the website in order to keep it afloat.

Once you have made these decisions, get programming, use your preferred language, obviously this article assumes that you’ll be using PHP/MySQL, but use whatever you are more confortable with.

I won’t give you any code here, as it would take a remarkable amount of time to do!! Instead I shall just wish you the best of luck with your website.