business website design

You never get a second chance to make a first impression. A business web site has a matter of seconds to get its message across and you could say that professional website design simply means that you are in control of that message. Good or bad, your web site design will say something about your company. A well-designed web site will say the right things, in the right way. In short, it reflects the strengths of your business.

In some cases, though, the most important part of your business web site is hardly ever seen by anyone. It's the underlying code that is read by the vistor's browser, and by the search engines, the "page source," and it's actually the only thing that the search engines actually read. A professionally-designed web site will meet several crucial requirements in terms of the content and the quality of the underlying code. If it's badly written, by the law of averages, what the site has to say is probably not too reliable either.

Mostly, it comes down to common sense. The search engine arrives at a page on your site. One of the first things it reads (in the page source) are the page's meta tags, which include the page title, description and keywords. Not unreasonably, it now expects to find that the text content you've written corresponds to these, i.e. that the page is about what its title and description (and keywords) say it's about.

Modern search engine algorithms have diminished the importance of these meta tags; it's no longer possible to stuff the keyword meta tag with all imaginable search terms and then to sit back and wait for the traffic to come rolling in. It is, however, a mistake to think that they no longer count. A page entitled "nuts and bolts" which goes on to talk about string and glue will never come anywhere near the top results in a search for either. We want to start talking about nuts and bolts right from the off and to continue in that vein until it's time to move on to our string-and-glue page via an internal link that incorporates the terms "string and glue." If we have an image on the page, the code that references the image should have a tag that tells us, in plain text, what the image is about (and if it's not about nuts and bolts, the question has to be asked: is this image on the right page?).

It also helps to have "clean" code. In the early days of web design, we used to start every paragraph by specifying the text font, its size, and its colour, together with sundry gobbledegook that would define the look and layout of the page. It was a mess. Web pages often had far more in the way of formatting code than actual text content. Modern web design takes almost all of that stuff out of the page source and puts it into a compact "stylesheet" file which also means that, when formatting changes are required, they can be applied site-wide, in seconds, just by editing the stylesheet. Clean code means that your actual text content is not diluted by unnecessary formatting/layout code.

Obviously, I'm just scratching the surface here. Good code should validate to established web standards and it should result in a page that displays well in at least the most commonly used browsers. A surprising proportion of seemingly professional web sites virtually fall apart in some browsers since they have evidently been designed and tested on only one (typically Internet Explorer for Windows). Screen resolution is another factor that must always be kept in mind. Remember the old 800x600 screens we all used to have? While you're reading this on your nifty widescreen laptop, it's worth bearing in mind that millions of people (and workplaces) are still perfectly content with their 800x600 CRT displays. Whether or not you're selling widescreen laptops, they could be the very people you want to target! It's often a compromise but your web site has to look as good as possible on as many screens as possible.

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business website design costs

Masonhost rates for coding/design work are £35 per hour. To some extent, the cost of your site is determined by your budget. I will work within any budget that can realistically cover the work requested. Your proposal will detail the site specification and the total cost but, as a rule, it is the budget that determines the specification.

If, for example, your budget for a five-page web site is £250-£350, I would be responsible for every element of design, coding and (basic) search engine optimisation. Each of these fields, however, are specialist fields so if, for example, your budget stretches to £650, we would probably wish to include specialist search engine optimisation.

N.B. in some cases, where a site has been built with out-moded or naive design practices, before SEO work can be carried out on a business web site, the site has to be completely re-built from scratch, so it's a major point that a Masonhost-built web site doesn't fall into that category. You could opt to postpone the SEO side of your business web site and be confident that, if and when you do decide to invest in specialist SEO, your site has been designed to be search-engine-friendly and SEO-ready.

Whatever your level of investment, your business web site is built with an integrity that reflects the strengths of my business and yours.