Step-By-Step Guide to Great Websites

We specialize in taking your ideas and turning them into a great website that reflects the tone of your business. Your website will help potential customers decide whether they want to do business with you, so the importance of having a well-designed, organized, informative, and attractive site simply can't be overstated. We can help, but first we need some input from you. Here's how to get started.

1) What Do You Want On Your Site?

The first step of putting together any website is to think about what information you want on your site. Let's say you're a bakery specializing in custom wedding and speciality cakes. You'll probably want your home page (the first page people see when they enter your web address) to show a photo of one of your most impressive cakes, as well as a short paragraph explaining who you are, where you are, and what you do.

Hopefully when people see your home page, they'll want to find out more. That's where your menu comes in. Every website has a menu where people can choose what type of information they want to see next. Clicking on the menu items will take them to other pages in your site with more information. Using our bakery example, your menu will probably include a link to a page that shows pictures of different types of cakes you make, a link to a menu of different flavor and size choices, a link to a pricing guide, a link to a page with more in-depth information about the history of your company and the people who work there, a link to a page with ordering information and policies, and a link to a page with contact information.

Websites can get even more complex. For example, you may want to break down the pictures page into several pages showing certain kinds of cakes, like wedding cakes, grooms cakes, birthday cakes, baby shower cakes, etc.

Seem overwhelming? It can be, so just start with the basics. Talk to us about the basic categories of information you want people to access on your site, and we'll go from there.

2) How Do You Want Your Site to Look?

We will put together a great design for your site, but it helps to start with some basic ideas about how you want your site to look. This input can be vague, such as simply saying you want your site to look clean and crisp. Or you could be more specific, requesting that we stick to the purple and gold color scheme of your logo. Even more helpful is for you to browse other sites on the internet and let us know what you do or don't like about them. Either way, you should share your ideas about how you want your site to look before we get started on the design.

3) Send Us the Stuff!

Once you've gathered together your images, digital photos, paragraphs of text, and other information for your site, you'll simply email it to us so we can start designing. If you have photos you want to use but they are not digital, we can scan them for you, although there may be some loss of quality in your images. We do not offer digital photography services.

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