There are many different factors involved in developing a website, and most people are baffled by the technology. This makes the process of creating a site for your company a daunting task. Who should you hire? What should you look for? How do you evaluate the different options? What can you afford?

Websites for all budgets

Everyone knows they need a website, and with all the options available to small companies today, budget doesn't have to be an obstacle. Of course, the old adage, "You get what you pay for" certainly applies here, but not everyone can afford to get everything they want in a website and they have to make compromises.

Looks Can be Deceiving

Most people judge websites primarily by their look. Although a nice design is important, it's relatively easy to create a decent looking site. However, the way the designer achieves that look can make all the difference in whether search engines can find your site and the results you'll get. There are many factors involved in designing a search-engine-friendly site, and it's much more difficult to design an attractive site that's search-engine-friendly.

Behind the scenes of a website

This is the complicated part, but you really should understand a little bit about how websites are built before you decide which direction is best for your company and how much you want to spend. For the purpose of this discussion, I can't address all the different website programming languages and codes, but here is a simple explanation of the evolution of the website design process.

Most websites on the web today, especially those built more than 3 years ago, are built with a combination of JavaScript (for interactivity) and tables (for design). This allows for a nice neat design, all in little boxes lined up perfectly. Designers created fancy little buttons in PhotoShop and sliced up their beautiful photos to create slow-loading sites with interactivity and Flash movies that dazzled.

The Google Revolution

A few years ago, everything began to change in the web design world. As the web grew, search engine optimization came increasingly important and progressive web designers learned to design with a new programming language called CSS (cascading style sheets). The goal of CSS is to create the same effects as tables and JavaScript with less cumbersome graphics and all the complicated code on a separate page. This allows Google spiders to easily crawl and index sites for their content, accessing it directly rather than having to crawl through irrelevant code to get to meaningful content.

Although sites designed with CSS can be just as attractive as table sites, it's much more difficult to achieve the same look without the use of tables. Since the typical website buyer doesn't know the difference, most web designers haven't bothered to learn the new technology and they continue to create table-based sites.

The Mobile Device Factor

Another reason to avoid table-based sites is that they aren't accessible to PDA's, smart phones and iPADS. Mobile devices can't properly read table-based sites, JavaScript and frames. (I haven't discussed frames because they are already almost obsolete.) With the proliferation of mobile devices, this is something that can't be ignored. Why would you want to start with a site that's already out of date? What is the value of that site and how long before it's obsolete? If you pay a little more for a custom-designed, search-engine-friendly site, your site will last longer, perform better and load faster. Read more...