Website Design
and Strategy Questions:

Q - "Why do I need a website in the first place?"

A - Having a website is the 21st Century is akin to having a Yellow Pages listing and business card in the 20th Century. Not having a website puts any company, organization or professional at a major competitive disadvantage.

Why? Because that's where your prospective customers expect to find out about you! Businesses are sought-out, researched on the Internet in the 21st Century. If you're not there, it's as though your business doesn't exist. . . it certainly can't be taken seriously!

Q - "When we first created out site, we invested heavily in professional graphic design, but we've never gotten as much business as we think we should. Why?"

A - Attractive graphics often take a long time to load. Remember, maybe half of your website visitors have high-speed Internet connections. Also bear in mind that people using the Internet are becoming more impatient.

Delays that might have been acceptable 3 or 4 years ago are deadly today!

If your home page takes more than 8 seconds to load, you'll lose over 30% of your visitors according to research. Pictures and graphics can help make a good impression, but they can also hurt you when visitors become impatient waiting for pages to load. Worst of all, a slow page tells your visitor you have little respect for their time and needs!

Q - "I've heard 'what you can't see can hurt you' applied to Web site design. What does that mean?"

A - Very true! It's possible to build two identical appearing sites, have one become a hit and the other a total dud! At least 50% of a site's success is in the html "coding" of the page, a part of the site structure you'll never see in a normal view.

The importance of "getting the coding right" is often neglected in favor of graphic design because that is what YOU are going to pay the most attention to before you sign off on the project. (This is most likely to happen when a site is put together by a graphic design company using primarily visual development tools. Often, they simply don't know any better.)

Q - "Why is it so important to update my website?"

A - We live in dynamically changing world. New technologies and systems come on-line every day. Nobody can afford to stand pat on a Website.  Unlike products or product categories with life cycles that last for years, Websites are a most perishable commodity.  Constant vigilance is needed to keep a website delivering maximum benefit.

Also, search engines "spiders" visit your site on schedules directly related to how often you make changes in the copy on your site.  If you don't up-date regularily, your ranking in the search engines will suffer because newer competitive site information will be better regarded.

See:
Search Engine Questions and Framed Pages and Meta Tag Questions

If your website hasn't got the right stuff under the hood, you don't stand a chance of winning the race!