Save money on your new web site with proper preparation

What to do Before You Call Your Web Site Developer

ELMA, Washington -- April 16, 2007 -- Even if someone else is going to create your organization's web site, you can keep the costs down by preparing beforehand. Designing a good website is not really that difficult. The technical "stuff" comes when you translate the design into the HyperText Markup Language (HTML) that gets uploaded to your web server (usually provided by a professional web "hosting" company).

Set Goals

First decide what you want to accomplish. A website is not a sure road to success. Failed "dot coms" litter the landscape, so make sure you have a reason for creating a web site. If you can't come up with a good business reason for a website, you might want to spend your marketing budget elsewhere.

Then decide how your new or updated website is going to contribute to your goal. Who is going to look at it? You may have a mix of visitors with different goals. One may be looking for a widget while another may want a widget installation service. What do your want each visitor to see? In what order? You may want to plan a different "route" for each of your different types of visitors. Make a chart for each route. Make it simple for the visitor to find things with a minimum number of clicks.

What will you show your visitor? Where are you going to show it? Assemble the pieces and create the marketing text using a word processor. Your webmaster can cut and paste a lot faster than entering it "raw", saving you money.

Overall Appearance

Next, you'll want to come up with a "look" for your site. All of the pages in your site should have a common "look". This may be a simple as your company logo in one of the upper corners and some sort of color scheme that your company has adopted for your other marketing efforts. Don't get too wild, you may get too "big".

Design it to be Useable

Not every person enjoys high-speed Internet service. If some of your web site customers are restricted to dial-up, you'll need to keep your pages "small". Not the size of the actual web page, but the amount of data that has to be downloaded to your visitor's web browser. Pictures and fancy "flash" are the big offenders. Keep the pictures small and the site pages simple and you won't discourage your customers.

Bring in Your Expert

Now, you can call our web master at 800-838-5958 ext. 801, since you've done the work he would have talked to you about anyway and charged for the conversation.

For more on web site creation, go to http://www.vikingwaters.com/htmlpages/websites.htm. Read down the left column, then follow the link at the bottom.

About Viking Waters:

Viking Waters consultancy is headquartered in the soggy Pacific Northwest in Washington state with clients and associates throughout the United States.

Viking Waters was formed as a "one stop" solution provider in 1994 by the merger of Valhalla Enterprises, a premier mainframe software consulting services company, and Waterwalkers, a leading networking and desktop consultancy. The resulting synergy has created a management, consulting, web specialist, and software outsourcing business that can handle a wide-range of organizational, computer problems, and applications on both desktop computers and the "big IBM^® iron".