Yes. Most businesses can benefit from a website. If you are looking to increase awareness, reach customers or grow your business (and you have to admit that covers most businesses) then you should seriously consider a website.
Most websites are custom built and so the cost of the website will depend the amount of time taken to produce it. The more features and pages you require, then the longer the website will take to develop and the price will increase accordingly.
If you are looking to work out a budget for your website project then you may find it helpful to think about the content and features that you will require and write this up in a specification or brief. This will give your web design team a good idea of the scope of your project and allow them to provide a competitive quote. Don’t worry if you are not sure about all of your requirements as you can draw on the experience of your web designer in developing the project brief.
As a guideline, a budget from starting at £1500 to £3000 will cover professional design for a small or medium sized promotional website. If your looking for e-commerce or online shopping features then you should consider a budget of twice this.
This depends on the scale of your project so can be anywhere from a month to six months or more. Having a clear brief and good content can often decrease production time and as with all projects good management is the key to success.
If you are planning a new website for an event or have a specific deadline then it is always good to start early and leave plenty of time for testing and amends before you go live.
Quite simply as often as you can, but this can sometimes be difficult. Plan to set aside some time to look over your website, correct any errors and update anything that has changed. Accurate, timely and well-written content is essential to any successful website.
Try to use spare office time (if you have any) and gather thoughts and information you might want to publish online together into documents. This way you can gradually build up new content and things are to hand when you want to update online.
Also, you don’t have to update your entire site in one go. If you have regular news or announcements then keep this up to date and the rest of your website will look current as well. If you do add new content or make changes, then highlight this rather than expecting visitors to find it by themselves
A web server is a computer program that recieves requests for information and then serves that information. The requests are usually from a web browser and come in the form "please show me the contents of this page". The web server looks up the contents of the page from various files or a database (or both) and returns it to the browser. This process happens everytime you view a page on the Internet.
There are several major web server applications but the most popular is Apache from the Apache Software Foundation followed by Internet Information Services (IIS) from Microsoft. Artsgraphica uses the Apache web server for all web projects although we have of course experience in other web servers.
You can run web server software on almost any computer but consideration should be made to the amount of traffic and bandwidth you will use. For example, a domestic PC may be suitable for running a webserver for a small company Intranet (internal website) with relatively small traffic but this machine is unlikely to be suitable for the company's main website. For public websites you get computer hardware specifically designed to run web server software at high performance levels. These computers are also called web servers and may be located in company offices or off-site in secure datacentres provided by web hosting companies.
Web hosting is a service that provides storage of data so it can be assessed online. This can be viewed in a browser (via a web server) or accessed directly using specialist programs (such as FTP). There are many different types of web hosting so it is important to pick the service that is best suited to your needs. These offer varying levels of storage space, server performance, bandwidth and may include support for server side scripting (such as PHP or ASP).
At the entry level there are many free hosting providers that offer limited storage space in return for displaying adverts on any web page served from them. This may be suitable for a personal website but are unlikely to be appropriate for most commercial websites. At the next level you may get a basic web hosting package bundled in with your Internet connection. This is likely to offfer better features and service support but may be limited in terms of storage space and configuration options.
Most small business websites are hosted on a shared server platform. This is where you rent space for one or more websites on a server provided by the web hosting company. There are many companies offering this sort of web hosting platform and they vary in price and performance. A shared server hosting platform may also offer scripting support (such as PHP or ASP) or an online database which is essential if you want to gather information online or offer more features to your website visitors. Shared servers can be the ideal solution for many small websites but as many websites are hosted on the same physical machine there can be the risk that a problem effecting one website may cause other websites on the same machine to loose performance or even go offline.
Up from the shared server platforms are virtual web servers which offer greater flexibility and have the capacity to run many more websites than the shared server approach. You will still get a number of virtual web servers hosted on the same physical machine but there tends to be much better separation of resources which can reduce the risk of problems. If you are hosting a number of websites with multiple domain names then a virtual server may be the most cost effective solution.
The next level of solution is the dedicated server. This is one machine dedicated to serving your own websites which gives high levels of performance and a comprehensive range of configuration options. You may choose to manage all the aspects of a dedicated server yourself or opt for a managed solution where the webhosting company provides assistance with elements such as updates and security. Dedicated servers are suitable for large, high bandwidth websites or web applications where performance and configurability are essential. On the downside the high levels of performance on a dedicated platform come at greater cost.
As well as this range of web hosting packages there are specialist hosting providers for blogs, streaming video, photographs and online gaming as well as services such as remote file backup.
With all web hosting it is important to use the package that is best suited to your needs. Do some research into the available options as well as asking questions about levels of technical support and service level agreements (SLA). More often than not, your web design team will be able to manage web hosting on your behalf but a little understanding of the options available will help you to make an informed choice about what sort of web hosting you need.
FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol and just like it sound is a method of transfering files over the Internet. In terms of web design, most designers will use an FTP program to upload the files that make up a website to the web server.
All of them. However unless your website is built using standards based code then this can be quite difficult to achieve. Back in the bad old days you had to design a seperate website for each browser that might be used. This lead to nasty statements such as 'Designed for Internet Explorer' appearing on websites that lacked functionality for the other browsers.
Fortunately, the web design world has matured a little since then and websites are being built to common standards. This means that they 'should' work across a range of platforms and browsers but this still needs to be tested to ensure that your website looks and works properly. This testing process can be quite time consuming but if this is done throughout production rather than at the end then this saves lots of headaches for everyone.
Sometimes you may need to use features that are only available in newer browsers. This is fine but these extra features should be added in such a way that they are available for visitors with newer browsers but don't interfere with older browsers. This approach is called 'Progressive Enhancement' and is essential in the world of Ajax and Javascript Applications.
The Document Object Model (DOM) is a method used by web browsers to conceptualize the contents of a webpage. The DOM is a kind of tree like structure that contains all the elements of the page and we can change the DOM using Javascript. This has the effect of instantly changing an element on the webpage. DOM Scripting techniques can be used to change the appearance of text, images, styles and even the layout of the page based on the user's input. This makes DOM Scripting a powerful tool in creating easy to use, compelling interfaces for websites.
DOM Scripting does rely on the capabilities of modern browsers and having JavaScript enabled. So designers need to be careful that webpages that use DOM Scripting will still work for users without these technologies. One possible approach to this problem is the concept of "Progressive Enhancement". This is when you build a website with basic functionality for everyone and add extra functions through DOM Scripting for those users that can experience it. This way your website is accessible to everyone regardless of what browser they are using.
DOM Scripting also presents some challenges for Search Engine Optimisation as the contents of the page may change and not be fully read by the Search Engines. This can be overcome by careful design but if search engine visibility is a concern then perhaps DOM Scripting isn't the best technique to use.
AJAX is a term coined by Jesse James Garrett of Adaptive Path in his article 'A new approach to Web Applications'. The technology makes use of the Document Object Model (DOM), JavaScript and something called the XMLHttpRequest. I will go on to explain what these technologies do but first we need to understand a little about the history of the web.
The web was originally designed as a document delivery platform. You can read documents, browse and follow hyperlinks to read more documents. When you press a link or load a page, a request is sent to a web server that basically says "please give me this document". The web server retreaves the document (either from a file or a database etc) and sends it back to the user. This delivery is a linear process and although it works well for documents (or pages) of content it falls short when it comes to interaction. This is because the whole page has to be reloaded every time.
AJAX takes things one step further. Rather than having to reload the whole page when the user wants more information, a nifty object (called the XMLHttpRequest) does the loading for us behind the scenes. We can then use JavaScript and the Document Object Model to display this new information on the same page. So rather than having to wait for the whole page to reload, the loading can take place in the background whilst the user is busy with other things.
Prior to the development of AJAX applications, this kind of interaction was only possible through plug-ins such a Flash or Java but with this new approach we can build better, easier to use websites and web applications without using plug-ins.
There has been a lot of hype about AJAX but in most cases this hype is justified. Google Suggest and Google Maps were pioneering applications that gave designers practical examples of the technology. Jesse James Garrett gave the technology a sexy name and the rest is history.
More and more websites are exploring what can be done with AJAX and DOM Scripting. So I would expect to see a lot more of AJAX in the months to come especially in the area of web applications and interface design.
I've heard about Web 2.0, can you tell me what this is about?
Google currently lists over 4 billion web pages so it is not easy to get to the top of any Google search. However you don’t have be at the top of a search engine results page to gain good traffic for your website.
All search engines use criteria to evaluate their results. By understanding these criteria and how they work you can tailor your website to get better listings against certain keyphrases. Since search has become such an important tool for finding content and businesses online, an industry has sprung up to help companies get better listings. This is called Search Engine Marketing (SEM) or Search Engine Optimisation (SEO)