Website Designers

Author
Discussion

burnstar

Original Poster:

49 posts

93 months

Thursday 29th September 2016
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Hi guys,

Any good website designers out there?

Cheers B.

Oceanic

731 posts

100 months

Friday 30th September 2016
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Are you looking for a graphic designer or developer?

burnstar

Original Poster:

49 posts

93 months

Friday 30th September 2016
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Morning,
Both or more accurately a combination of the two?

Cheers B

Flooble

5,565 posts

99 months

Friday 30th September 2016
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Have you identified the business benefits from having a website with a clear idea of the scope of the development and functionality required?

Serious question, am not being sarcastic. Because if all you have is "need a website" then it could get really expensive to use developers/designers to perform business analysis.

First step may well be to build something yourself using SquareSpace or whatever and see if you gather traffic, before engaging expensive people.

jammy_basturd

29,776 posts

211 months

Friday 30th September 2016
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wavey Feel free to PM me about the project.

Dejay1788

1,311 posts

128 months

Friday 30th September 2016
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For what reason do you need the website? It it's Ecommerce you can get one up and running yourself quite easily.

burnstar

Original Poster:

49 posts

93 months

Friday 30th September 2016
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Hi guys,

Thanks for the replies. In short, yes, its for an E-Commerce site but the USP around it really needs a very clean, immersive interface to allow the customer to engage and identify with the product. As with many business' now its going to be multi-channel and the site will have to be similar to social media pages in the interactive sense.

My other main priority is the correct use of SEO and how search engines will reference the site. I work in IT so have a good handle on things. What I also have is a full-time job. The project is quite expansive and taking a lot of my resources up (mainly time) so to get some professional help is the way to go. Yes, I could subby it out to an website development company and have a wordpress based page built for around £1000 but I would much rather form a relationship with a fellow PHer and build something awesome!

Cheers B.

Zoon

6,654 posts

120 months

Friday 30th September 2016
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burnstar said:
immersive interface to allow the customer to engage and identify with the product.
Talking like a pretentious designer is a sure fire way to increase costs. wink

burnstar

Original Poster:

49 posts

93 months

Friday 30th September 2016
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Haha thanks Zoon, I need to be more careful smile

DSLiverpool

14,673 posts

201 months

Saturday 1st October 2016
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burnstar said:
Hi guys,

Thanks for the replies. In short, yes, its for an E-Commerce site but the USP around it really needs a very clean, immersive interface to allow the customer to engage and identify with the product. As with many business' now its going to be multi-channel and the site will have to be similar to social media pages in the interactive sense.

My other main priority is the correct use of SEO and how search engines will reference the site. I work in IT so have a good handle on things. What I also have is a full-time job. The project is quite expansive and taking a lot of my resources up (mainly time) so to get some professional help is the way to go. Yes, I could subby it out to an website development company and have a wordpress based page built for around £1000 but I would much rather form a relationship with a fellow PHer and build something awesome!

Cheers B.
Depending on product obviously but in a lot of cases SEO is wasted money, multi platform and social media and paid ads seem to cover it now unless your a local business say Wirral Gardening.

Were about to experiment with VR Viewers with a FB shop, Instagram click through and a landing page with paypal buy button - plus ebay and Amazon. No website - Target is 1000 units before xmas - should be interesting.

Altrezia

8,517 posts

210 months

Sunday 2nd October 2016
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We do this stuff. smile

Super Slo Mo

5,368 posts

197 months

Sunday 2nd October 2016
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Very appropriate thread for me too this is. I'm in the process of migrating our site over to a new hosting company, who are mostly web designers and marketing specialists.
Last week they told me our Joomla site is out of date and they want to build a new Wordpress site. Cost of £3500; with add ons and other stuff, including 'SEO' and an email campaign the bill has come to £15,500. I've put the brakes on for now while I look at alternatives.
Any suggestions would be appreciated. It needs to be e-commerce. I don't know a great deal about web design.

AW111

9,455 posts

132 months

Sunday 2nd October 2016
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One thing to be aware of : the more social media integration you have, the more time has to be spent to keep it all currrent.

Instead of just calling or using email, people ask questions on twitter and facebook as well, and expect a near-instant anwser.
They also expect regular updates to facebook etc.

That's not necessarily a bad thing, just something you need to be prepared for.

DSLiverpool

14,673 posts

201 months

Sunday 2nd October 2016
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Super Slo Mo said:
Very appropriate thread for me too this is. I'm in the process of migrating our site over to a new hosting company, who are mostly web designers and marketing specialists.
Last week they told me our Joomla site is out of date and they want to build a new Wordpress site. Cost of £3500; with add ons and other stuff, including 'SEO' and an email campaign the bill has come to £15,500. I've put the brakes on for now while I look at alternatives.
Any suggestions would be appreciated. It needs to be e-commerce. I don't know a great deal about web design.
Write a brief of your requirements (in whatever form you can) and where you want it to take you in a given time period and give it to three companies. Your right to put the brakes on if this has not been done as you dont know what your paying for.

uber

855 posts

169 months

Sunday 2nd October 2016
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Ad Dave has already pointed out e-commerce is an ever changing game and as it grows so does the the challenges faced by retailers and developers who need to keep up with the market leaders and put more resources into projects than ever before.

The days of one man band web developers being able to enter competitive niche markets is long gone as modern e-commerce is a multi skilled project which one person alone can not be a master of all (Think of it like you would surgeons)

The other end of the market is big agencies who can often deliver the full package but often use third parties to build the actual application or site. This option is great if you have the budget but often it’s just a repackaged service which comes with the agency big brand guarantee.

There are also various ways to build a website and the only way anyone can really tell the difference is when it comes to real life use and as it tries to scale. Sites built using old development methods will be cheaper but have a shorter lifespan than something built for 2016.

Many developers will know how to build a Wordpress theme or a Magento skin but asking them to build something from the ground up is focused on the product and usability is where many will fall over and give in. The amount of sites you find with hacked together modified plugins which “do the job” is widespread and often the site owners have no idea of the impact.

Search marketing is another subject which many of the one man bands and many other agency types have no idea about. Unfortunately Google has made it easy for anyone with 2 hours to spare to become a qualified expert and often the experience they have is based around installing YOAST and building some links from their local DA35 supplier!

Before you even consider building or rebuilding the site research needs to be done. This includes looking at the whole of the market, competitors, trends etc and building the solution around that.

We are working on a product right now for a customer who has a great product but has had trouble selling it as it involves a number of steps which can not be found “off the shelf”

He had previously burnt 20k with a “expert” company who had tried to hack together the site using Magento as that was the stack they suggested. They got it working but not in the way it should, intuitive use was replaced by “what magento will do” and the end result was an expensive site with no traction. Worse again if sales did arrive the backend had no way to admin the subscription order so should it scale they would be unable to manage it.

We built the a MVP version of the site in a couple of weeks and got it live. He immediately had more order in the first 72 hours than he did in 4 weeks of the old site. At that point he wa happy to invest more and build out the product more and more.

If you are going to build something spend lots of time with the developer and talk as much as possible about your business. Quiz them on how well they understand your industry as they need that knowledge to make your product successful.

Super Slo Mo

5,368 posts

197 months

Sunday 2nd October 2016
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DSLiverpool said:
Write a brief of your requirements (in whatever form you can) and where you want it to take you in a given time period and give it to three companies. Your right to put the brakes on if this has not been done as you dont know what your paying for.
Thanks for the advice, I will do that. I've a breakdown of what they are charging for in overall terms, so I will look at it in detail next week when I'm back.
We don't really have the money to do it all in one go anyway, need to put money into new stock.

DSLiverpool

14,673 posts

201 months

Sunday 2nd October 2016
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Super Slo Mo said:
DSLiverpool said:
Write a brief of your requirements (in whatever form you can) and where you want it to take you in a given time period and give it to three companies. Your right to put the brakes on if this has not been done as you dont know what your paying for.
Thanks for the advice, I will do that. I've a breakdown of what they are charging for in overall terms, so I will look at it in detail next week when I'm back.
We don't really have the money to do it all in one go anyway, need to put money into new stock.
Revenue share agreement ?

Super Slo Mo

5,368 posts

197 months

Sunday 2nd October 2016
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DSLiverpool said:
Revenue share agreement ?
That's an interesting suggestion. The obvious problem is that I can't give any projections as to turnover although I can see the incentive for the web designers to make it work properly.

DSLiverpool

14,673 posts

201 months

Sunday 2nd October 2016
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Super Slo Mo said:
That's an interesting suggestion. The obvious problem is that I can't give any projections as to turnover although I can see the incentive for the web designers to make it work properly.
I've sent you a message, we have 2 Rev share projects underway at present. One of which I am hoping will be huge.

Super Slo Mo

5,368 posts

197 months

Sunday 2nd October 2016
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Cheers. Probably won't be able to pick it up until Tuesday PM or Wednesday AM but I will look out for it.