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What the internet can do for your business

How much does a website cost to design and build?

Because of the nature and the scope of websites it's a very difficult question to answer without drilling down into the nature of the project and what is required. There are so many variables involved in the building of a website. One analogy would be houses; You can't go into an estate agent and ask how much a house costs. You can't even ask how much a semi-detached house costs because an enormous number of factors need to be taken into consideration - its location, has it got a garden, and if so, how big is the garden? Whether it has double glazing and central heating, what the decor is like. How new is the boiler, and is it in an area prone to flooding? Once you get into specifics, then the estate agent could quite easily tell you that a house in this location, in this condition with these fixtures and fittings and a garden this size is worth X, and it's the same with a website.

What Maddison Creative web design Newcastle can do, though, is once we've had a chat about what you're looking for, we can work out how long it will all take and give you an up-front cost with the guarantee that if the project takes longer, or is more work than anticipated, then providing the scope of the work involved doesn't change (ie there are no further requests or changes to the original brief), then the cost will not escalate, so you can budget in advance of the work, safe in the knowledge that it will not escalate.

The web - what is it and how do I access it?

The World Wide Web or 'Web' for short is a network of web pages that can be accessed via a huge network of computers known as 'The Internet' (note the difference - the two work together to allow people to access online resources, but are not the same thing!). The internet allows computers to connect with each other and display content from one (a server) on your connected device.

'The Web' was born in the mid-1980s, the brainchild of Tim Berners-Lee, a physicist then working for Cern, and was conceived as a way of sharing resources remotely via hyperlinked documents. It was launched to the public in 1991 along with the first 'browser', a program that interprets web code and presents it in a user-friendly way, allowing anyone to access any of the documents linked via 'The Web'.

To access the web and all of its bounty, you need a device capable of running a browser, a browser itself, such as Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox or Safari and an internet connection. To view a website page, someone with all of the above needs to open their browser and type in the 'domain name' or URL (uniform resource locator) into the 'address bar' to go directly to that website, or if they don't know the URL, or to browse a number of websites relating to what they're looking for, they would navigate to a 'Search Engine', Google or Bing for example.

Search engines are programs that continually index what's available on the web, using small programs knows as 'spiders' or 'robots' to scour the web for any files they can find, reporting back on their content and other information contained in those files (webpages, images & other documents) and the search engine then records that information and uses it to categorise websites, ranking them on their relevance and quality in order to decide which sites to show you when you search for any given 'search term'.

Originally, webpages were limited in what they could do, and were simply a way of sharing information with limited interactivity - a far cry from today where they are fully immersive and an integral part of each of our lives, to the point where internet access is now considered a basic human right!

What does my business need to do in order to develop our own website and what will the process involve?

Every brilliantly successful website starts off with a brilliant idea. Whether your idea is to fill a gap in the market, a way for you to earn a living, whether it's to satisfy a great need, or whether it's a product, a service or some form of entertainment, the idea is the main reason that your website will succeed or die a slow painful death. You need passion, a great team, discipline, hard work, of course you need all the tools available to you that a website will afford you, but if your idea is a dud then if will ultimately all be for naught.

Once you've completed all your planning, you know what constitutes success and how you're going to measure it, you've done your market research and have the funding in place you can then think about how you're going to make the next step of anctually getting online. These days it is definitely a question of how, and when and not if - the internet has become so fundamental to the success of a business that not to have a website is not really an option! It's at this point that Maddison Creative Web Design Newcastle get involved and provide support with industry expertise, over a decade of launching websites, and an in-depth knowledge of what can be achieved, what works and what doesn't, best-practice, what you will require to acheive your goals, timescales and costings.

Once that's all been agreed, the next step is generally for us to come up with a site structure and a visual (usually flat without any functionality) to give you a feel of how the website will look. Once these two have been agreed and signed off, then we set to work combining the two, and hey-presto! You have yourself a website.

From a logistical perspective, to build, launch and maintain a website, you need a domain, ie www.something.com, space on a server which can be provided by a hosting company , you need your website files, and you need a program to allow you/us to transfer your files onto the server. and you need the files you create. Once they're up there then your site is live for ayone to enjoy.

We can take care of all of this - it's what we do. We've built relationships with some of the best hosting companies to get your the best deals of hosing and domains. We use cutting edge FTP software to transfer your files quickly and securely. All this is included in any of the packages you can get from Maddison Creative Web Design Newcastl, so you needn't worry about it.

If you already have hosting or a domain and you'd prefer to keep it, then it's not a problem - we can work with what's there, transferring over anything we need and talking to providers to ensure that everything we need for your site to work beautifully is there.

How do we measure the success of our website, and what web design tools are available for reporting?

If you own a restaurant you have some ways of monitoring how your businesses is performing; you can check your takings and orders, you can take a look at your bookings and you can monitor how much stock you're getting through, and you can anecdotally measure when the waiters and waitresses are busy, but beyond that there's nothing more specific you can drill down into to gauge how your business is performing and how to improve it. Wouldn't it be great if you could find out exactly how many people looked at your menu at the door and decided to move on to the next restaurant? How many people tried to book a table and who couldn't because you were busy, and at what time? Which were your most popular tables and why?

With a website and with the reporting tools we have available to us as webmasters/website owners and web deisngers and developers we now have all this insight available to us at the click of a mouse. You can find out who visited your site and where they are located, what time they navigate to your site, how long they spent there, where they came from and which page they left at. Which links they clicked on, whether or not the purchased anything and whether they engaged with any of your multimedia content - did they watch your video to the end or did the bail after 30 seconds?

This also applies to your online advertising/emails - you can interrogate any number of metrics to determine whether or not your campaign is a success, which bits of it worked, which didn't and where you should focus your energy on improving, to ensure that it is a success the next time you run it.

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