Getting Started - Assessing Your Needs

Before we can begin building your web site, there are several things that you will want to consider.

A web site is much more than a fancy electronic brochure or order form. Providing a multitude of tools for your business, a web site is a place for direct interaction with your clients or customers right in their own home or office. Your web site can be your greatest customer service vehicle, providing your customers and/or potential customers with product or service information, such as instructive manuals and design specifics. You can provide forms to be entered electronically and stored in your database, or printed and filled out manually.

Your web site can be a great tool to generate sales leads or to sell your items on line. You can display graphics and photo images that will entice people to do business with you and/or provide useful information to current clients and customers. The possibilities are as varied as there are types of businesses.

Following are a few things to consider before planning the design of your site:

• Purpose: As I stated above, a web site has many advantages. These are all built around your primary purpose. This purpose may be to boost your company's image, or to create a list of prospects, provide product or service information, sell products or services, or simply to provide forms for customers in a convenient, easily accessible manner. Whatever the main purpose, you should have that purpose clearly in mind, along with the primary goal you want to achieve.
• Audience/Market: What will be your primary audience? Consideration of age groups, gender, race, economic status, areas of interest and other factors that make up your core audience is important. This is your Target Market, and you should know, as much as possible, who that market is, whether you are retail business or a service organization. Even if you feel that your product appeals to almost everyone, you still need to define a marketing target.

  It would be an interesting world if you could just put up a web site and have 10,000 visitors a day, but its not going to happen. Knowing your Target Market is the first step in effectively promoting your site. It is also the most important factor in retaining visitors once they have found you.

• Style: Style is very important to your intended audience. Will it be conservative, or carefree, or somewhere in between. Do you want to convey a sense of serious professionalism or a casual, friendly atmosphere? Is it important to portray your expertise, reliability, dependability, or just good customer service? Do you have a particular color scheme in mind?

  These factors combine with your Purpose and Audience to help us to design a site that is "just right" for you.

• Site Organization: We can provide you with several ideas where it comes to the organization of your site. It is helpful, however, for you to have a general idea of your site's organization plan.

  Will a few simple menu selections do, or will you need to have multiple selections under different categories, and, if so, what will those selections be. Will you have documents or manuals that will span several pages, and will you want to provide word links within your text to enable the viewer to look up more specific information. It is much easier when these items are planned out in advance, rather than as "second thoughts".

• Content - Text: All text should be meticulously edited and presented to us in electronic form. This can be created with any standard word processor with formatting for bold or emphasized text, with larger headline text, etc. The style of font makes no difference. We charge extra for editing text (not style - this is something that can be decided upon later). Although we do provide editing services, and we are more than happy to do the work, if you have a sizeable amount of text, and you do not have the time to do this yourself, you should consider using a secretarial service for document editing. This will reduce your overall expenditure, or allow more of your budget to be used for design work.
• Content - Photos and Graphics: Number one - make sure any material you have does not infringe on anyone's copyright, or that you have permission from any copyright owners. Photos and graphics may be submitted to us in standard or digital form. We do not charge extra for scanning.

  If you are in need of photos or graphics for your site, we can recommend several sources, in varying price ranges. If you would like us to research these for you and provide you with a selection of graphics to choose from, you will be billed at an hourly rate for that research.

  Unless you have requested us to find graphics for you, all graphics will need to be submitted to DataBoy prior to our providing you a solid quote. This is necessary to allow us to assess whether there may be extra graphic work involved in your project. We will provide you with the means to upload digital graphics to us, or you may send them via e-mail or on CD. If the graphics are not in digital format, you may send them via regular mail or in person. When sending photos through the mail, please make sure you have the negatives in a safe place. If you do not have the negatives, have copies made, but send us the originals for quality's sake.

• Sound, Animations, Video Clips: We can create animations for you as an extra service. There are several considerations, with regard to your intended audience and the usability of your site, that should be considered when adding sound and video. If you want to add these mediums to your site, it is important that they do not detract from speed and accessibility. Search Engine Optimization should also be considered. Some technologies, such as Flash intro pages, may reduce the ability of search engine robots to crawl your site for indexing information.

  On the other hand, these technologies can be very useful and helpful in producing eye-catching or informative contributions to standard format pages. Have in mind what you want to do, and we will discuss the various factors from there.

• Web Hosting: There are many web hosting services available, from your local ISP (which we usually do not recommend), to a multitude of hosting providers offering varying services. If you currently have a web host, we will need to assess what services they provide in order to determine the degreee of compatablity with the ideas you may want to implement.

  We can work with the majority of hosting companies. Some provide prioritized or limited services that may require concessions when planning or upgrading your site. Our preference is that you host with our company, EzRabbit.com. Our rates are extremely reasonable, as we established the service primarily for our web design clients. In addition, we can more easily tailor these services to your specific needs.

• Promotion: How you will promote your site depends very much on what type of site we will be creating. We will provide you with several useful methods, including search engine placement, and provide some of those services for you. In addition, your own creative ideas should be considered beforehand. We may be able to incorporate some of those ideas into the planning of your web site.