So you are looking for a Fort Myers web design company to build a new website to promote your business, its products and services. What next? Will you build it yourself? Should you find a friend who knows how to build websites to put it together for you? Or do you go the more expensive route of hiring a professional company to build your site for you? As important as these questions are, they shouldn’t be the first that you are asking yourself, yet invariably these are the only questions that people pose to themselves before jumping in with building their first website.
Fort Myers Web Design
The most important question that needs to be answered is what are you looking to achieve by having this website built. If you don’t know the answer to this question then you could find yourself left with this superb looking website that in end makes you no better off than you are right now.
When deciding your objective you need to consider the following:
- Who is your target audience? Are you promoting business to business or business to consumer? Answering this question should give you clues as to the type of design you should be looking to achieve and the type of language that should be used to create the content.
- Are you marketing to a local, national or international market? You will need to be sure that your website can be found on the Internet and answering this question will have a bearing on how competitive the keywords you should be targeting are going to be. Local keywords are much easier to get ranking for than generic keywords that don’t have a town or city name attached to them.
- Do you need to sell your product or service online via your website? If the answer is yes, then you are probably going to need some kind of payment gateway like PayPal, or Authorize.net in place so that you can accept credit cards online as payment.
- Do you need to capture your website visitor information so that you can market to them later on? The answer to this question is usually ‘yes’, since most people who visit a website do not buy immediately and they may or may not return to your site later on to make their purchase. So keeping your details in front of them as often as you can is usually a good idea.
Most of the time these types of questions aren’t considered until it is too late and the business owner has paid out a deposit to their Fort Myers web design company and all of a sudden there is a price increase for the project which they are now obligated to.
Make sure you select the right Fort Myers web design company to meet your exact needs
If this is your first site, before making any decisions, you should definitely speak to a few Fort Myers web design companies to get their advice and to see what questions they ask you. This way you should have most of or all of the answers to these questions before you make a final decision.
These day it is pretty easy to set up a fairly decent looking website yourself for next to nothing. You can even set up a website and have it hosted for absolutely nothing, as long as you don’t mind having a lot of third party advertising on it and being pretty limited in terms of the amount of content you can add. Most hosting companies do offer simple to use website building software (Site Builders) that allow you to create your website without needing any coding knowledge. Site builder are simply website templates that permit you to change certain elements e.g. colours, pictures, certain text, etc. Hosting companies like GoDaddy, 1and1 and Hostgator all offer site builders as part of their hosting services.
If you decide you want to have something more customised but need to keep your budget low then there are some very accomplished people out there who can knock you up a quick and simple website for not too much money. But before making this decision remember the objectives that we discussed and be sure that you have factored in all your answers before having your website built this way. If your designer in only skilled in design, and has no knowledge of things such as database design or search engine optimization, then your website may need to be upgraded or even rebuilt later on if you need to utilize these services. A professional web design and development company, although will probably be more expensive in the beginning, may, in the long term be your most cost effective option if you are looking for a website that is more than just a few pages of content sitting on a web server somewhere.
Prior to agreeing your website design a few other things you should consider include:
- Search Engine Optimization - In the vast majority of cases business websites should be optimized for the search engines. Deciding how your website is going to be found on the Internet is just as, if not more important, than the actual design decision. Not every Fort Myers web design company offers, or even understands, search engine optimization. The days of being able to simply stuff your meta tags and your content full of keywords have gone, and SEO has become more of an exact science. Unfortunately there are some people out there who are tarnishing the reputations of search engine optimization companies as a whole. So if you do decide to work with an Fort Myers SEO company be sure to vet them carefully. And check how well they are doing in Google with the search phrase ‘SEO Fort Myers‘. If they are not ranking highly on page 1, then you may want to think again. If they can’t get their own business ranking highly why would you believe they can do it for your business?
- Content – Are you going to write your own content, or are you going to hire the services of a professional content writer. Regardless of which way you go be sure to take into consideration your selected SEO keywords. Your content needs to be written in such a way that it satisfies your prospective clients and, if possible, the search engine spiders too.
- Images – Are you going to supply your own photographs for the website, or will they be purchased from royalty free websites, like iStockPhoto or Dreamstime? The cost of royalty free photographs can add up, so be sure to include these within your budget.
- Website Hosting – The cost of building your website is one thing, but hosting (the server where your website resides, and is connected to the Internet) is a separate charge. There are different types of hosting and the most common is shared hosting. Shared hosting is where your website sits on a common server with hundreds of other websites. This is usually the cheapest form of web hosting, but it does have its disadvantages e.g. if one of the companies hosting on the server starts to spam then the server’s IP address could become blacklisted and will affect the performance and accessibility of your website. Other options for hosting include independent hosting (where your website(s) are the only ones being hosted on the server) and mirror servers (where your websites are hosted on two separate servers. The second server would mirror the first server, and once the first server goes off line then second server would automatically take over. So to website visitors it looks like your website hasn’t gone offline and you can continue to service them. This type of hosting would usually apply to mission critical type applications such as eCommerce or membership type websites).
There are many Fort Myers web design companies to choose from. Not all of them are equal, so it is up to you to do your research to determine which is the best fit for you.
