Once you decide you need a Web site, it’s time to decide who will build it. If you have the technical know-how or the money to hire a full-time Web staff, you can develop the site yourself. But if you’re like most small businesses, you’ll want to outsource the work.

Be careful who you hire, though. A poorly designed Web site can cost you money, drive away customers, and hurt your reputation. Follow a few basic steps to increase your odds of hiring a creative, technically savvy, and cost-effective design firm.

1. Assess your needs. You can hire contractors to create, implement and maintain your site. If your site will serve only as an online brochure, consider outsourcing the creation and implementation, while handling future maintenance — like fixing broken links — in-house. Be realistic about your own goals and growth plans so you know whether to hire a long-term or a short-term contractor.

2. Research each candidate’s work. It’s essential that you research a Web developer’s work so you can evaluate their potential. Once you’ve found a few developers you like — through recommendations, Web directories or competitors’ sites — evaluate their online portfolios and fees. A site doesn’t have to be flashy to do its job, but you must appreciate the developer’s design sense. Also, consider hiring a firm familiar with your particular industry.

3. Evaluate their services. Decide if the developer meets your needs. If you want to sell your products online, look for proven e-commerce experience. If you’re considering a one-person firm, does the developer have the skills necessary to create everything you need? On the other hand, will you get lost in the shuffle at a larger firm with lots of other clients? Determine what extras the firms offer, such as copywriting, marketing, and other services.

4. Meet face-to-face. Your Web design firm, whether a one-person shop or a multinational company, is going to present your Web persona to the world. You must be able to work collaboratively. Ask yourself these questions and rely on your gut reaction:

• Do they listen to my needs?
• Do they explain issues in ways I can understand?
• Do they know my industry?
• Do they share my vision for the site?

5. Check references. Browsing a company’s work is helpful, but you also want to know how they work. A Web design firm can be the most creative in the world, but if it never finishes your site, it won’t do you much good. Call past clients and ask if the design firm:

• Adhered to deadlines
• Met their requests
• Was responsive to suggestions and questions
• Fixed problems promptly
• Worked within the original budget

6. Think ahead. Over the past year, hundreds of Web design firms of all sizes have merged, cut back their operations, or simply closed. Although it’s impossible to know for sure whether or not a firm will be around in the future, you have a right to ask questions if you expect to build a long-term relationship. You should also ask whether a design firm will accept payment in stages or whether they’ll demand most of their payment up front. Firms that aren’t willing to link payment to their own ability to deliver might not be worth the risk you’ll take to deal with them.

A well designed and coded website is now one of the most powerful weapons in a company’s marketing armoury.

A good, well designed, easy to navigate and search engine friendly (SEO friendly) website will obviously rank high in search engine result page resulting more traffic to the website.

This article summarizes why a good website is necessary and how can a website be made more appealing to online traffic.

A website is an online identity of a company or of an individual involved in Internet Marketing. The task associated with the website is to represent a company, sell company’s name, attract more visitors, generate more business leads, promote more sale of company’s products and services and ultimately, help to gain more return on investment.

In this era of advanced technology, electronic commerce have highly dominated the marketing practice, and due to easy availability and affordability of the Internet, people are running after it and making huge profit at the comfort of their home.

As a serious online business person, what is important for your business is, to prepare a website that is well designed, attractive, easy to navigate, highly usable, good content, full of relevant information, enough functionalities and are capable of retaining visitors for long and make them come back again.

We know, Web is the visual interface and what people look on the Web will be manipulated and interpreted into their mind and perception. So you must be careful about the use of color effects, lights, visual effects, positioning and size of contents and use of search engine friendly technology, so that people must remember your website name first and search you first on the Web.

To achieve all the above mentioned strategies, your website design and building needs a professional touch from qualified website designers and developers, such as The Cookehouse, who can put their best acquired knowledge and experience to make a suitable portal that can turn each visitors into potential buyers.

In fact, there are two types of website design such as; static and dynamic website design. You can opt for static as well as dynamic website design where former is based on simple HTML code and latter is developed with advanced and sophisticated technologies based on the information provided in the database. Dynamic website is actually selling these days, because apart from its beauty and diverse applicability, it gives the ease of quick and self information updating facility to site administrator without being proficient technically.

Another important factor for a well designed and programmed website is the quality search engine optimization (SEO) service. SEO is the basis of search engine marketing success, because website optimization process spice-up the website with relevant keywords, facilitate one-way link, enhance link-popularity and place website at top or near the top of search engine result page that ultimately help in attracting motivated buyers and more traffic to website.

With well over 10 years experience in website design, developement and programming, The Cookehouse can help in all aspects of online marketing and web design.

The Cookehouse’s upgraded CMS now gives customers totoal control over their website content. Never before has so much control been available!

Can your existing CMS:
• Let you control the SEO for each and every page?
• Let you control the SEO tags and titles for each and every image?
• Let you control the navigation menus for the whole site?
• Let you add brand new webpages?
• Create webpages templates for existing pages?
• View how each page looks on Google?
• Add RSS feeds?
• Control documents, images and media files directly within the CMS?

If the answer is no to the any of the questions above TALK TO US TODAY! Our CMS can be easily retro-fitted to your website with minimal fuss and no downtime to your site.

Find out more about Website Design and Content Management

www.thecookehouse.net has undergone phase 3 of it’s ongoing development. Check it out!…

Whether you’re looking for a simple promotional web design or a dynamic online, eCommerce shop, we’re proud to offer our clients affordable, high quality websites that will perform for you and your business.

The Cookehouse create beautiful websites that are feature-rich and cleanly coded to comply with the latest search engine optimisation (SEO) algorithm rules.

We also run one of the worlds most simple CMS (Content Managment Systems) that lets you take full control of your website and it’s SEO.

The Cookehouse will be implementing CSS 3 to it’s customers websites for use with Firefox, Safari, Chrome and the forthcoming Internet Explorer.

The Cookehouse is now able to offer fully Content Managed (CMS) websites at the fraction of the cost of other design businesses, thanks to InContext.

Your website can now have any area you like turned into an editable area – all through Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari etc. We can even retro fit it to your existing website!

Add pictures, links, change text/paragraph styles and colours. YOU BECOME THE WEB DESIGNER!

Get in touch for more information.

In accordance with the DDA (Disabilities Discrimination Act) and Best Web Practices, we have added Visual CAPTCHA, with audio for the hard of hearing, to our contact forms.

We will be rolling this out and retro fitting this to all our customers websites.

See http://www.thecookehouse.net/contact.php for further details

The Cookehouse website has been redesigned to full SEO and best practice standards, using the latest Table-less & Semantic Coding, Correct Keyword Research, Title and Meta Tag Optimisation, and ImageATL and Title Tag Optimisation.