Guide for Beginners
This guide is intended for potential clients who are thinking about creating their web presence and need our assistance for the same. It will give you some insight on the reasons why you should be having a website for your business. Once you are through with this article, you should be able to clearly state your requirements when you get in touch with us either on phone or via email.

Why a website?

Before we move on further, you will have to think of the reasons why you should have a website. Some of the reasons could be:

1. To provide the latest information about my business to existing and potential customers.

2. To provide the details of our products and services to the world.

3. To reach masses. Web is available to the customers world-wide 24X7.

4. To provide online services to our customers.

5. To provide the online trading, sell items etc to our customers.

In the vast majority of cases, a website is primarily used to disseminate information to current or potential customers. This reduces the time spent explaining the same information over and over again on the phone or in person, speeds up the decision process and frees up staff to be more productive.

What type of website?
Once you have a clear goal in mind, next thing you will to establish is whether you require a static or dynamic website.

Static web sites do not change automatically. They will have the static text and pictures to provide  relevant information about you, your business, contact information, business location, map, products, services etc etc. The static websites could also have animations, videos, music etc for impressing your customers and providing more relevant information. On your static website, you could also have various forms that you might want your customers to fill up and send them to you via email. These are the cheapest category of websites. If you need to change anything on the static websites, you will have to contact us. We can sign an annual maintenance contract with you for making relevant changes to your website on a regular basis. In the absence of annual maintenance contract, we can still make the relevant amendments to your website, for a nominal fee.

The dynamic websites are usually needed when the content of the website needs constant changing. You might want to use the website as a news letter which gets updated on a daily basis, or have a facility to add or remove information on the special offers that your business might be offering for attracting customers. We can provide you the website having the feature for content management. You will be able to use your userid and password for logging onto your own site and then amend the text or graphics. If you feel that it will be too technical for you, then you can leave that to us and we will be happy to provide the content management services on an annual contract basis or on adhoc fees basis.

You might want to have a database for your dynamic website. Database can be defined as a structured collection of records or data that is stored in a computer so that a program can consult it to answer queries. The records retrieved in answer to queries become information that can be used to make decisions.

If you are intending to use your website for selling items, you will need to store the information like the item code, description, picture of the item etc in a database, which could be displayed on the web page based on your customer's searches. Or, you might wish to have the facility on your website which allows your customers to register themselves with your business and take regular products or services.

You might also want your website to have a facility by which your customers could make online payments for the products or services they purchase from your website. Your customers could use their credit/debit cards and make online payments for ordering items like books, cards, stationeries etc that you might be selling via your website, or they might even order food online from your restaurant.

the website to perform any functions (eg: ecommerce shop, visitor registration/membership, client administered content or any kind of database storing data that will change over time).

Examples of some very common web solutions are:

Ecommerce shopping carts

Selling various items online (via your website)

Content managed

Content managed websites are typically for v. large websites with lots of staff editing the content.

Forums and discussion boards

A platform where many people can log in and discuss/debate various topics.

Classified advertisements

You might want to publish advertisements of other businesses on your website (like they have it in the newspapers/magazines).

My database requirements are unique
Unique requirements such as a new online business idea generally require bespoke coding and development either from scratch or modifying existing applications, making the website build significantly more expensive.

We will need an indication of what types of data needs to be stored and what type of functions are required - try to walk through the website processes (adminstering, registering, using, purchasing, etc) from the view of: yourself as the administrator; as a registered member (if required); and as a website visitor.

Other things to Consider
Your website address
This is referred to as a domain name. If you wish to register a domain name, contact us. We will try and get a domain name of your choice and register the formalities with the domain name registrars. Once you have your domain name, it very easy to point the domain name to any server. You may have already registered one, in which case ensure you have the username and password for the registrar's control panel where you purchased it.

Managing your website content
Many clients request this ability - if you do not intend to edit the content regularly (ie: daily-weekly) then a content management system is probably overkill (in terms of specification and also cost).

We would recommend you use a desktop application such as Adobe Contribute which is inexpensive and allows you to browse the website as you would normally, but with the added features of editing text and managing pages.

Company identity and logo
Creating a company identity/logo is separate to the cost of designing a webpage, although a logo will likely appear within it.

Flash animation
Flash has sometimes received bad press due to its ease of use - everyone in the 90's was producing terrible animated intros with 'skip' buttons. Flash can be used in a much more compelling way or even to produce entire websites. Some examples:
» Flash animation within HTML
» Complete Flash website

If you have any questions please telephone/email us and we will be happy to advise and talk through the process.