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Posts Tagged ‘web designers’

OK, so you have come round to the idea that you need an internet prescence. You are fully aware that the future of advertising and gaining new clients will be internet based. What has worked in previous years such as newspaper advertising may well now be a thing of the past. We all have to move with the times if we are to continue to succeed.

The scary thing for many new webmasters is all of the initial costs of setting up a website. I remember all too well just how expensive it was around ten years ago when I had my first website designed and built. It was based on the subject of speech therapy for stammering and I was investing in this new site at a time when I did not have a great deal of money. I have to say that it has proven to be one of the best investments that I have ever made. The website certainly enabled a lot of people to find out about the stuttering therapy service that I offer.

These initial setting up costs include the web design, the web hosting and the purchasing of the domain. Then there are the ongoing costs of web promotion; there is of course no point in having a top notch website if nobody ever visits it.

So how can we ensure that we receive a web design service at an affordable price? Well as in many businesses it is not what you, it is who you know. It is a good idea to ask your friends and colleagues if they know of any professional web designers, especially if these friends or colleagues already have a website. This way you may be able to secure a deal on “mates rates”.

The second way is to speak to freelance web designers as these people usually offer cheaper rates than the web design agencies. Many up and coming web designers start up on their own on a self-employed basis and are normally happy to offer a discount whilst they are building up their portfolio.

The following are a few suggestions for those checking out inexpensive web design and marketing:

- Pay Freelancers To Make Software For You And Give It Away Free. This can work very well indeed. Research the most popular freeware PHP scripts; can you think of an addon you could get developed and have your own backlink put in it?

– Beware The Latest $49/$97/$149 Software. There are a lot of web marketers who’ve realised that the best way of making cash on the web is to gull other web entrepreneurs, as there are so many of them. This often takes the form of releasing, in a software or service, an idea that was cutting edge six months ago. By the time Joe WebMaestro gets wind of it, it’s done to death. Research it thoroughly before plonking down money for it. Seek out independent reviews.

– Post In Popular Message Boards And Blogs to kick your campaign off, if they’ll let you use straight hyperlinks in your signature. This is a short-term measure if you want to acquire back-links. It’s a long-term method if you want to sell to forum members.

– Beware Of The Guru! There are a multitude of semi-famous marketers and their acolytes out there flogging videos, books and courses on how to make bank in web marketing. They’re marketing tips on how to do marketing! Nice work if you can get it. The best advice you can find about internet marketing is on marketing message boards. Even then, you have to use your own personal noise filter to sniff out the gold from the trash.  

– Have More Than One Web Host. Have more than one net hosting account if you have a lot of sites. Spread the sites out over different accounts. That way, if one web host goes ‘splat’, it will be a minor irritation instead of a twelve-hour slog putting twenty sites back online. You can place the resource-intensive stuff on the good, costly host, and the lighter websites on the $5 p.m. hosts. You can then, using SSH and FTP, backup one site on-server and FTP it to another account directly. This can save a lot of time. It’s also much quicker than downloading a backup to your PC and re-uploading it somewhere else. Have you got a 2MB broadband internet connection? The 2MB is the theoretical _download_ speed. Ever try _uploading_ a fat file? A lot slower, isn’t it?

– Handy Software: 1. Easy Text To HTML Converter. This software can batch convert text files to HTML. See also: dirHtml. WordCleaner can convert Microsoft Word documents to HTML. 2. WinSCP. This is a very clever piece of FTP software. 3. AXS Visitor Tracking System. A very fine hit counter. 4. Port 2096. If you have CPanel on your webhost, yourdomain.com:2096 is the internet address of your email accounts. 5. Netscape Communicator 4.8. This has a very good email client (Netscape Messenger) and a handy freeware WYSIWYG HTML editor (Netscape Composer) in it.

– Clean Up Your HTML. Dreamweaver adds lots of extra blank space to HTML code, and breaks lines. This is especially annoying in meta tags. Use EditPad’s ‘Find and Replace’ function to get rid of newlines and double blank spaces in your pages.

– Use Freelances For Jobs You Lack The Skills For. Is your budget tight? Try scriptlance.com or rentacoder.com. The key to getting the best work is to a) be as clear as possible as to what you want and b) write your spec in simple, concise terms. Your work will likely be done by somebody who’s first language is not English. Most people give an inexact specification and receive work they’re displeased with. Pick someone who’s had a lot of favourable reviews recently. Pay in increments. Use the freelance site’s escrow service. Don’t expect to acquire more than you coughed up for, and don’t be cheap; if somebody does an effective job, they deserve a bonus, not quibbling.

I hope these few basic ideas will be of some use to you in getting useful web design and marketing done effectively.

About the author: Niccolo Svengali is an author for web site design consultant UK and UK adverse credit loans internet sites in London, UK.