This third blog post on the essentials of a website continues to share with you our learnings of developing our website. Do read the first and second post

1.    Website Designers

We are assuming here that while you will provide the content, you will ultimately hire a designer to put all that up for you. Do a profile check before getting any designer on board. Luckily in this case the work of the designer would be up already as part of somebody else’s website. Understand who will be working on your site. You could also share the sitemap with them and tell them that you are looking at them to pitch for your website. This works best if you are corporate client.

Before signing, understand and record the terms and conditions. Ensure that you have written down all that is part of the package as you will surprised how your costs have escalated from where you had started. It would be a good idea to surf several your work related sites. That will give you idea on what different features are available as part of HTML language. You could also give out reference screen shots for specific features that you have liked.

2.    Incorporating a Blog

It is common for corporate to have blogs for themselves. Blogs help in sharing recent news and quicker updates. There are two options available in linking the blog with the site. The company can create a blog and provide a link to it – which means that the user will go away from the site once he or she clicks on that link

The other option is to host the blog as part of your website. So technically when the user clicks on the blog link from the website, he or she can still access the links of the website. We have gone ahead with the second option as we would like the user to spend maximum time on our site.

3.    Cost of the website

The costs of the site depend on the number of pages you create. Typically, there is a standard rate for a limited number of pages and then on per page basis after that. Your sitemap will help you in figuring out the number of pages you will have. Remember to account for pages like sitemap, copyrights, disclaimer etc among your other business pages.

If you would like to use online images, you would have to pay for it. Normally companies like Getty Images have sections of free images provided you give them credit for it. Otherwise you would have to buy from them or get them shot yourself. This is where a good designer can come handy. Most of them have good collection of stock images that they could use for you thereby helping you reduce costs.

4.    Testing your site

After your site is ready, do a test run on it to ensure it works beautifully across platforms. First such test you must conduct is on the various browsers. The most used ones are Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Google Chrome among others. There are times when certain special characters don’t appear in the same manner on certain browsers. While IE stills retains highest market share in Indian market, the other browsers are catching up

Check your site also for different resolutions and different screen sizes. That will show the amount of scrolling the guy with smallest size screen will have to do. It is also important to test your site on different platforms like Windows, Macintoch, Linux etc. You can do all the tests at this site CrossBrowserTesting or leave it for your designer to do it.

Share your website with few close friends and take their point of view. We gained immensely by doing this. This is classic case of power of many. Just when you think you have got it all under control, someone gives in a valuable input that missed your mind.

With this, we end the third part of the series. Do continue reading our last and concluding part of the essentials of a website

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Tags: blog, browsers, designers, Essentials, testing, Website 1.0 & 2.0

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 22nd, 2008 at 9:00 AM and is filed under Essential Series, Website 1.0 & 2.0. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.