Never underestimate the power of the internet. An increasing number of people use the internet to search for a business or service so having a web presence is an important media for promoting your company. Web design is a real skill and if your website is to not only look good but work well, it should be constructed by a professional web designer.

Have you noticed these days that so many websites all look the same – square box in the middle of the screen? That’s because it’s fairly easy and cheap to use the many templates available to build a simple website. There are many web designers or friends of a friend out there that will offer to do you a website for a few hundred pounds but there are many technical issues to consider to ensure really professional results.

A good website should have the following attributes:

Strong corporate identity
User friendly navigation
Quick to download
A useful resource
Expandable – needs to incorporate technology that allows scalability
Visually attractive to encourage usage
Must work in all browsers on all computers PC and MAC
Good investment / value for money
Search engine friendly

Remember that first impressions count and a badly designed website is worse than having no website at all. You wouldn’t get a friend of a friend to do your company brochures or service your nice new car you would go to a specialist, so why take the risk and compromise on quality with your website.

A well designed website with good graphics and strong corporate branding will last for years and should be a good investment for your company. Updating the content is simple and inexpensive.

You can start with a small but well designed website that fits within your budget. The key is to ensure that your website is expandable so that as your business grows it can be added to – you may even wish to add a database or e commerce functionality at a later stage.

We believe that Flash is really designed for use in the entertainments industry and we do not recommend using it on a business website. Even with the increasing availability of broadband Flash can be very irritating for users, it serves no purpose, it can detract attention away from the important messages on your website and it will adversely affect your search engine rankings. Strong visual affects can be achieved using other methods.

Using HTML is the most popular and cost effective way to design a website. These can include original graphic designs and are text driven to incorporate relevant search terms, which is good for getting your site recognised by search engines.

DYNAMIC websites incorporate a database and offers more user functionality. A dynamic website can be classed as a web application and is a powerful tool for gathering and providing data for your customers who will be able to log in and search the site quickly for information. If you require a dynamic database driven web design you will have to budget for the back end coding required to build the database. This will be more expensive than a HTML site and will need specialist hosting.

As a less expensive alternative it is possible to build a HTML site which links to a third party database which you can access through your existing ISP.

An E-COMMERCE WEBSITE is an online secure shopping facility so that customers can purchase your goods by credit card over the web.

John Lewis is a multimedia designer who specialises in producing interactive CD Rom, original graphic design Scotland and web design Scotland

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