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Why every business should be online

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.

Websites and the World Wide Web - what are they?

The Web, or World Wide Web (www) is a series of linked (by hyperlinks) documents that can be accessed via the internet.

The web and internet are often confused but are actually two different things - the web is the network of documents that is hosted on the internet, which is a giant network of computers that can communicate with each other. The web as we know it came about in the late eighties, an invention of British physicist Tim Berners-Lee, then an employee of Cern in Switzerland. The first browser was made available to the public a couple of years later, allowing anyone in the world to access 'The Web'.

To access the internet, a user requires a computer, an internet connection and a program known as a browser, which allows your computer to interpret web resources. Viewing a webpage requires the user to type in a 'Domain name' or URL into a browser to go directly to any given site, or navigate to a Search engine. Search engines constantly crawl the web for any document they are able to access and record content from each of those pages, ranking them by how relevant and suitable they are to the user searching, based on what they're searching for. Originally, websites were only able to display information with limited functionality, but as the technology has grown, so has the capability of the web and websites to interact with users and to query any number of data sources, resulting in the web being the necessity in each of our lives it is today.

Could you imagine going a day without checking your social media accounts, making a purchase from one of the millions and millions of online shopping sites, or managing your daily admin via an email account or online banking? I certainly couldn't!

What are the advantages of making use of a website to promote and market my business online?

One advantage of promoting and marketing your business by means of a website is that you can promptly and easily make updates to your online promotional material. Unlike print marketing and advertising you can come up with a new marketing initiative in a meeting at 9am, by lunchtime it can be live and you will know whether or not it's likely to be a success by the time you go home at half five, changing or updating your offering the next morning should you wish. You can also react to market forces or opportunities in the market, being among the first movers when an opportunity presents itself. Print advertising simply wouldn't allow you to do this, the lead times being significantly greater.

It also reduces the amount of time and money you spend on outdated campaigns. Once your offer changes or is no longer available, with a print campaign all of your posters and flyers that you've painstakingly had produced at great expense need to go in the bin, with great cost to you and a significant cost to the environment. With a website, you simply get in touch with your webmaser/web designer/website manager and they will quickly and cleanly make the change for you online, and you are ready to go with absolutely no waste. And should you have chosen to have a content managed website (CMS) it's even easier - you simply log in to your site and make the changes yourself.

Web development and web design - what's the difference?

To build a fully functional, beautifully designed website traditionally requires a web developer and a web designed working together, to cover off all aspects of the design and build. While it is true that a lot of developers are comfortable designing and a lot of designers are comfortable developing the two disciplines are distinctly different:

A web developer is primarily responsible for coding, server-side, in order to allow the website to function. This can include managing the server and the transfer of files and additionally some client-side scripting such as Javascript, but it is predominantly programming.

A web designed on the other hand is responsible for the aesthetics of the site, along with the user-journey and experience. This may also include client-side scripting such as Javascript and HTML, but it is traditionally about the design and layout of the page, imagery, colours, branding and user behaviour.

What about good web design and Search Engine Optimization?

Search engine optimization, or SEO is the process whereby you make your site as finely tuned as possible in order to ensure that Search Engines such as Google and Bing consider your website worthy enough to show ahead of all the competition.

This involves writing the content in such a way that it relates to the words (keywords) your potential customers will be searching to find whatever it is you're doing/selling/saying. It also entails making sure that all the key elements of what makes up a good website are there and put together properly. Titles, images, framework of your site, links - they all have to be right.

This also includes things you can't see - the invisible tags that sit behind your webpage, but that do an important job nonetheless. A good web designer will do all of this as a matter of course, but there's always room for improvement, especially as time marches on, and best-practice and guidelines change and what used to be the done thing is now frowned upon.

How have mobile devices influenced web design, and what are responsive websites?

Two in every three minutes spent online are spent by users using a handheld mobile device (phone/tablet), while thirteen percent of adults in the United Kingdom browse the web only on their mobile phone, whereas 11 percent browse the web only on their desktop which highlights the trend in the diminishing reliance on desktop computers in favour of mobile devices. Over the last two years, tablet use to browse the internet has increased by around 33%, whereas in the same time frame mobile use in browsing the web has increased by almost 80%, whereas desktop use in browsing the web has diminished.

This has influenced the way that web designers are now required to build websites. Because of the high likelihood that someone who arrives at your site will be using a mobile device, it is now the norm to design for 'mobile first', which means that everything functions and renders beautifully on a mobile device first and foremost, and then secondarily we will consider how it looks and feels on a desktop. It seems like a long time ago that companies were happy for users to browse the full version of their website on their smartphone, having to scrollabround the page and zoom into areas they were interested in looking at in closer detail, struggling to navigate using tiny text hyperlinks.

One practice, when smartphones were becoming popular, was to create a totally separate version of your site for mobiles, but as technology has developed it is now possible to use css to adapt your website to the device it is being viewed upon, so the user is effectively seeing exactly the same page irrespective of their device, it is just rendered differently because it is pulling in different styles. A website built in this way is known as 'responsive'.

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