The Design Process

What costs are involved in having a website?

There are four main costs associated with having a website: domain, hosting, site development and maintenance.
Domain: This is the "address" or "URL" of your site, such as spiralpixel.com You can buy it from many places around the web, however we usually offer it as part of our design package. e.g a .co.uk name costs £10.00 for two years.
Hosting: Where you're hosted is where your site lives. You can pay either a monthly or yearly fee for a server to host you. We charge £70.00 per year for basic sites and £80.00 per year for ecommerce and blog related sites, basic site maintenance is included in the price. Your site will be hosted on a server of high quality and reliability.
Development: Getting a website designed and built can range from a minimum of £25 - £50 per page, depending on the size and complexity of the site. All costs will be discussed thoroughly before setting out on our venture together.
Maintenance: Your site is complete and online. What further costs should you expect? That depends on whether you prefer a "static" site or one which changes regularly. We charge for edits on an hourly basis. If for example, it is just a simple change like to update an address, date, location, replacing a picture, we'd change something like £3 - £5. With all clients, we don't charge anything if it is to correct an error we made (spelling or incorrect date). Also, if we're not able to get the change up within 24 - 48 BUSINESS HOURS (not including weekends), we do not charge the customer.

What should you look for in a web designer?

The most important issues are: design style, finding someone who shares your vision, and good customer service.
Style: We specialize in designing well-organized, professional sites, that reflect the client's personality and needs.
Vision: We work with you to create exactly what you want, and if you don't know what you want, we help you figure it out. Pleasing the client is our number one priority. It is a balance between incorporating the clients' vision and my creative expertise.
Customer service: Jo is online nearly all the time and will respond to your enquiries within 24 hours. If you need something done in a hurry, we can almost always oblige you.

How do you decide what your site should look like?

Think about what kind of information you would like to share with people. The most important question to ask yourself is: what kind of image do I want to project? Serious? Elegant? Fun? Your website should be a reflection of you.

The Design Process

Projects are never straightfoward, steps often get moved around, so please think of this as a basic example.
Step 1: Discussion: We will start your project with an informal chat. At the first meeting we will establish the basic scope of the work - what needs to be done and how you would like it to look.
Step 2: Planning: Here we will think about how we are going to structure things. What is important? What is not? What needs to be on every page? Depending on the scale of the project a visual sitemap will be created for you.
Step 3: Planning the Content: Working from the sitemap we will get together to start planning the content - specifically the text. Content planning and writing is probably the biggest workload you will have during the project - and it can take some time.
Step 4: Initial Design: Whilst you are working on your copy, I usually work on the initial design - the homepage and logo creation if needed.
Step 5: Client Feedback: When the basic design is ready, you will need to check that I am heading in the right direction and suggest any adjustments.
Step 6: Design Rework: This involves going back and reworking things.
Step 7: Client Approval: This process of work, feedback, rework is repeated at various stages in the project. Besides preparing the content, this confirmation process is also one of the main responsibilities of yourself.
Step 8: Additional Page Design: Once the design is agreed on, work will begin on the layout and design of each individual page of the site.
Step 9: Confirmation: Once again they are checked, reworked and then finally confirmed.
Step 10: Present to Client: We will work together to polish and amend things until you have a completed site.
Step 11: Test: The final stage of production is the debug. The site will be tested across all platforms to fix any technical problems, and checked thoroughly for content errors. Naturally, throughout the HTML & CSS development stage I check for cross-browser functionality.
Step 12: Launch: This is the fun part for both designer and client, hopefully we are both happy with the end result! After launch any problems found will be fixed.