The Work Factor

Doing It Yourself?

We couldn’t lie about it even if we wanted to, because building a website from scratch is hard work! And it’s even harder if you have no experience doing it. But if you’re willing to take the time to learn the required skills, be prepared to learn a lot. As the sole person responsible for every aspect of website design and maintenance, you’re going to need all the right tools and every bit of knowledge to use them.

Here’s a brief introduction to three essential tools you’ll need and want to use as a web designer:

HTML Editor Tools

You’ll first need a good web page editor and we highly recommend that you find and stick with the WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) kind. These software programs will display web pages as they’re being built much like the way that word processors display documents as they’re edited.

• NVU – Best editor there is and it’s free.
(www.nvu.com)
• Microsoft Front Page is a popular, easy-to-learn HTML editor but there are others, some quite expensive and some that are entirely free.
(www.microsoft.com)
• Microsoft Word – Although not quite a HTML editor, Microsoft Word can save word processing documents as HTML webpages.
(www.microsoft.com)
• ColdFusion offers a lot more features than both of the Microsoft packages above, but it’s also a lot more difficult to learn and a lot more costly too.
(www.adobe.com/products/coldfusion)

Graphics Editors

A website that doesn’t use images to enhance its image or communicate a message is rare website indeed. Almost all websites display icons, artwork, or photographs of some sort. You don’t need to be a professional artist or photographer to display graphics—you just need to know where to find high-quality imagery to use and edit as your own.

Here are a couple of good leads:

• Clipart.com
• Free-StockPhotos.com
• PaintShop Pro
(www.paintshoppro.com/pspx_offer/index.html)
• NeoPaint
(www.neosoftware.com/npw.html)

Multimedia Editors

In addition to imagery, a growing number of websites incorporate animation, sound and/or video into their presentations. It’s easy to get carried away with adding these elements to a website because they make the final production sophisticated and exciting to use. When used excessively however, they can slow down data transfer and make an unfavorable impression on visitors who don’t have the proper equipment to handle such a rich form of media.

Use multimedia sparingly only to support a website’s purpose.

TIP:  Remember that there are still a large number of Internet users who use a dial-up connection. Animation, sound and/or video files are more appropriate for visitors with a cable or DSL type connection.

TIP:  While learning how to acquire, code, or manage a website on your own could save anywhere from a hundred to thousands of dollars, they do require an extensive amount of learning. If you need to get your website up and running rather quickly, your best bet would be to outsource as many of these tasks as you can afford!

Working From A Template

Short of handing the responsibility of designing a website to someone else, website templates make the whole process ridiculously easy. In a nutshell, website templates are complete website designs minus custom content. Depending on the type of template, website owners can either:

1) download, modify, and then re-upload edited templates to a server, or
2) edit a template online and save changes on a remote server.

The first approach uses templates called turnkey packages while the second approach uses templates called prepackaged software solutions. Both approaches are low-cost methods of producing a website, yet they don’t allow for unlimited customization.

Outsourcing the Job

Web design couldn’t get any easier when it’s outsourced to someone else. As a significant time and money saver, outsourced web design grants access to experienced web programmers who can quickly facilitate the entire process, usually within a month’s time.

The key difference between this approach and the other two described above is that hired programmers have a lot of control over how things work. In fact, programmers are usually the folks who update and maintain the site because they’re the ones who are most familiar with it.

TIP:  Outsourcing could leave you out of the loop unless you’ve taken the time to familiarize yourself with some of the ways that websites operate. Learn some basic HTML so that you make harmless changes to your website without being completely dependent on your programmers.

Another difference with outsourcing web design is ownership. In the above approaches, the website’s owner retains ownership (copyrights) to the final design, however, depending on the contract between you and your programmer, you may not own copyrights to your site at all.

Before agreeing to any type of outsourcing arrangement, read the contract and get specific answers to what you’ll get for payment, what will or could be subcontracted to another party, who handles updates, and who keeps copyrights. If necessary, have a lawyer review the terms of any contract before signing it.

The Cost Factor

Budgeting the costs for designing a website is a different beast altogether but it basically follows a simple formula:

More Stuff = More Expense

The more that you can do yourself, the less expensive your costs will be. The expenses involved in designing a website may range from a simple $150 investment to a whopping $10,000 expense. The following describes what could increase or decrease website development costs:

• website type; static or dynamic
• website requirements; sometimes require special software or tools to support
• Multimedia, Audio, Video, Flash,
• Duration of development
• Contents; images, website contents, copywriting
• A system (other programming require for the development)
• Paying for web hosting; sometimes normal shared server unable to support and it require special server with certain requirements
• Support
• Legal fees for copyrights, trademarks, patents, etc.

Things that could affect the rate of these costs could be the decision to:

• Budget website design services
• Register low-cost HTML editing shareware (or use free software)
• Use multimedia material in the public domain or purchase low-cost stock images, sounds, and video
• Completely outsource the entire design of a website or only outsource specific tasks
• Learn how to code HTML, JavaScript, VB Script, and any number of other web languages
• Host a website on a privately owned network

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