Web Design That Communicates and Sells
“Form Follows Function”
It’s not enough for you to have a great looking site. Your business must communicate your Key Message clearly. This is true for all of your marketing, but if your website in particular fails at this it’s as if you’ve invited a bunch of people to a party, but no one’s home.
You’ll see that the main point of my website designs stands out first and foremost. “What is it?” "“What’s it about?” “Why should I care?” Beyond that, I take the reader or visitor through the next logical steps to achieve your goals. Fundamentally, your Key Message is expressed by every aspect of the design. My web designs are clear, bold and always persuasive. Depending on your goal, sometimes they’re complex and at other times they’re very basic. Each project dictates the requirements of the design.
Standards Compliant XHTML/CSS
Since 2005 the field of web design has officially implemented the use of Cascading Style Sheets to determine the look of a website, “the presentational” code. This means that all of the complex and bulky code that used to be needed to make some text regular body copy, some text bold subheads, and columns positioned correctly is now contained in one separate document, a stylesheet. This has made web design not only much more logical it makes the content of your website more accessible. If you see the phrase "standards-compliant," know that it ultimately means “more accessible”. It literally refers to modern browsers (Firefox, Safari) that comply to the same current technical standards. That same compliance also means that your cellphone, PDA, or assistive devices can access the content of your website. That’s because the older version of HTML that included all of that presentational code in every webpage also gets in the way of these devices. In some cases, these devices may be barred from seeing your content and so they can’t access it. But if your website is made "standards-compliant" most likely that means it’s accessible and that means more people can find your business, product, service or message. That is not the case with websites that rely heavily on javascript, Flash or other third-party code to achieve their design requirements.
Pricing and Fees
Each web design project is priced individually. Web design is not like brochure design. The constraints of printing force projects to limit themselves to a specific size of paper and a specific number of pages. But web design is far more flexible. Some projects can consist of just one page, even if they don’t look that way. The functionality of a site can make you believe that there are hundreds of pages involved when in fact there’s only one. The opposite may also be true. A website consisting of several pages may in some cases be easier, production-wise, to put together because all of the pages stem from a single format or template. A single-page website with complex functionality may be far more challenging. So, pricing a web design project really requires a thorough discussion with the client to get a better idea of what is needed and wanted. A flat, one price fits all is not realistic and pricing websites per the number of pages also does not make sense.
Most of my project fees for websites range from $3,000-$5,000. Websites that require more complex back-end technologies, such as dynamically generated pages and such, call for a higher fee and can be quoted accordingly.
