We've assembled the following list to help you understand what information/materials we need in order to begin work on a new Web site. It has been our experience that the number one cause of additional time/cost for Web site development is incomplete information. The majority of clients want to bring us a few pictures this week and some text next week and some more material the week after. This can add many hours to the development time/cost of your site. In order to ensure that we are able to work as efficiently as possible we need to get as much of the materials necessary to build your Web site before we actually begin. A quick summary of what we need to get from you is "You must provide anything that you want to be available for viewing, reading or downloading from your site and descriptions of the items that you will need us to create for you." Since the scope of this statement is so broad, it can be quite confusing. So, we have broken it down in the list below.
Your Site Outline is the basic starting point for your site's design. Your Site Outline will also be a huge help in determining what's needed for the rest of the items in this guide. It can be as complicated and detailed as you care to make it, but it should, at the very least, list all of the pages you think you'd like to have in your site. The common pages that most Web sites tend to have are: Home page, About Us page, Contact Us page and Map page. Your site may or may not have all of these and will almost definitely have a few not listed here. We find that a good way to get ideas for what you want on your site is to look at other Web sites that are in a similar field. Our clients often print out pages that have features that they like or write down the Web site's address and bring them to us as reference. This is a big help to us in determining your idea of what is and isn't acceptable in the design of your site.
The text content for your site is anything you want to tell your visitors. The welcome/hello message on your home page, the short history of your business on an About Us page, product descriptions; these are all text that you must provide to us. The best way to provide this text to us is simply to type it into a Word document and e-mail it to us or you could type the text directly into the e-mail message itself. The point is that we need to get the text in a digital format that we can cut-and-paste from. This is in the interest of keeping your cost down. For example, a 5 page document takes only about 10-15 seconds to cut-and-paste into your Web site, whereas that same document could take up to an hour to type in manually. So you can see, the time/cost savings to you can be dramatic.
Important Note: We cannot use Microsoft Publisher documents.
Images are photos, logos, clip-art, etc.
Any photos that you'd like to use on your site can be provided to us as regular photographs or in digital format such as jpeg or bmp. You can e-mail these digital photos or bring them to us on CD. If you cannot provide the photos in digital format, keep in mind that there is extra time/cost involved to scan the photos into our computers. (Please do not print out your photos to bring to us as these home-printed photos look just awful when scanned.)
Any other graphics, such as logos or clip-art, should be provided in a digital format if possible. However, if you only have your business logo on a letterhead or business card, bring it in and we'll see what we can do. Also, keep in mind that the print shop you use to print your business cards or letterheads will have your logo in a digital format. They're usually more than happy to provide your logo to us in a digital format at your request.
Important Note: Extracting images from Microsoft Word documents is very difficult and often ruins the image, so please do not send images to us in Word documents.
Your Domain Name is the Internet address of your Web site (such as yahoo.com or microsoft.com) Most of our new clients do not have a Domain Name registered and this is mainly because they don't know where to begin.
The first thing you have to do is come up with several ideas for domain names because it's highly likely that your first choice (and possibly your 4th and 5th!) will already be taken. We have three tips that you should consider: keep the name as short as possible, don't use any special characters such as dashes or underscores unless absolutely necessary, and keep it simple. If you have to spell your domain to people, it's going to be more difficult for them to remember it.
The next step is to visit www.betterwhois.com in order to find out if any of your domains are available. When you've found a domain that is available we strongly suggest that you allow us to register it for you. This allows us to provide assistance to you if you need to make any future changes and to help you remember when your domain is up for renewal. We've had several clients loose their domain or be forced to pay high fees to have their domain reinstated because they registered their domain with another registrar and didn't receive their renewal notices.
We need you to provide us with a list of all of the e-mail addresses your company currently uses as well as any new addresses you'd like to have created. Most of our new clients already have at least one e-mail address and most of them want to keep this address. We're behind this 100%, however we also recommend that you have at least one address with your domain to use on your advertising and business cards. What that means is if your new Web site's domain name is "www.mynewwebsite.com," you'd have an e-mail address like "info@mynewwebsite.com" to give out to your own clients. It's just much more professional than "john436@hotmail.com." This new e-mail account can be a completely separate address or a forwarding address that sends any e-mail it receives directly to your current address.