Start gathering quotes for business web design – or any professional service, I suppose – and you’ll notice right away that there will be a general range for professional work, along with a few that seem to be a little too good to be true. But, in this tough economy, the choice is clear, right? Isn’t it smart to save a little money where you can get a great deal when it’s offered?

Before I answer that question, let me point out two very important things. The first is that, in web design and almost any other business, you are highly likely to get what you pay for. And secondly, especially in business web design, what you pay for your project isn’t nearly as important as what you get out of it. In other words, a site that seems a bit more expensive now is a steal later if it ends up doubling your profits.

With that being said, the one thing to pay close attention to in any suspiciously low business web design quote is what’s not being listed.

In other words, are you really getting a great deal, or is it that they’re just taking away the “extras” that are most important to your site?

Here are at least five things that should definitely be included in any business web design quote:

A search engine optimization and marketing plan. It doesn’t matter what your site looks like, or what it does, if no one can find it. Make sure it will be accessible on Google, Yahoo, and Bing at a minimum.

Ongoing service and minor updates. What happens if you need to change a page, or find that you left a typo on your homepage? It’s important to pick a business web design team that will still be there when you need them.

Web hosting. Hosting might seem like a minor detail, but it affects your site speed, performance, stability, and even search engine positioning. Make sure you’re getting a competitive rate for high-quality hosting.

Social media links and profiles. Sites like Facebook and Twitter are more important than ever, and your company is going to suffer if you don’t have a presence on each of them.

An ongoing plan to grow your company online. Remember, your website shouldn’t just be an online brochure, but an important part of your marketing and promotion plan. What is your new business web design company doing to help you make it more successful?

We all like to save money, and it’s tempting to go with the rock-bottom business web design quote. Before you do, however, make sure that you aren’t spending less at the expense of your company’s future.

If you want some of the best Calgary web design and online marketing, contact eKzact Solutions for a free consultation today!

One of the great tragedies in life, and business online, is that nothing lasts forever… and that very few things even last for very long. Get a fantastic haircut, and you’ll quickly find your hair hasn’t stopped growing; buy a wonderful suit, and you’ll notice that it’s only a matter of time before it has to be taken in or out because you’ve either gone on a diet, or need to.

In some ways, it’s the same with your small Calgary business website. Even if you invest in a high-quality design that fits your company perfectly, impresses visitors, loads correctly across all kinds of browsers, and helps your company to make more money, it’s probably going to need to be tweaked or updated eventually.

The good news is that great websites don’t have to be completely replaced very often. In fact, it’s often a matter of just making a few small changes when you need them. Here are a few things you should definitely add or review on your business website, even if you aren’t ready for a major redesign:

Social media links and integration. If you’re a regular reader of this blog, you already know that social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn are big business. It’s important that you have links to your profiles and content on these sites, since they can make it easier for people to find you outside of your business website, and vice versa.

Search engine optimized pages and content. Moving onto the first or second page of the results for your most important keywords on Google, Yahoo, and Bing can be an enormous boost to your business, but it’s getting harder to improve your search engine rankings all the time. For that reason, it makes sense to review your pages from time to time, to ensure that they’re optimized, and that you are still emphasizing the right keywords and phrases.

Product descriptions and prices. It goes without saying that accuracy, especially in product descriptions and prices, is an important part of the upkeep on your business website. Still, there are a surprising number of companies that regularly fail to keep this kind of data current. Whether you’re using a content management system or not, be sure that your site is up to date.

FAQs, contact information, privacy policies, and other details. More and more, people are basing their online buying decisions on how certain they feel that you’re going to do what you say you will, how quickly they can expect their order, and what they think you’ll do with their personal information. Make it easier for them to buy with clear, customer-friendly details on your business website.

Psychologists will tell you that there are large groups of people who feel overwhelmed by “information overload,” or the ever-growing and expanding amount of data that’s available on the Internet. We regularly meet with small business owners who seem to be suffering from a similar effect – one we might call feature overload – where they aren’t sure which of the “must-have” tools and technologies need to be integrated into their next web design.

In other words, they often aren’t sure exactly how new a new business web design actually has to be in order to be an effective marketing tool.

Even though it might run contrary to a lot of thinking within the industry, we’re going to go out on a limb and say for the record that having the latest and greatest features on your business site isn’t always all it’s cracked up to be. Don’t get us wrong, there are definitely some fairly-standard features – like a good content management system, social media integration, search engine optimization, etc. – that can make your company more profitable in a hurry. But there are also a lot of things that just add to time and expense of your business site, make it more complicated for people to use, and generally get in the way of good usability.

Good design is classic. The way we code websites might change, but the basic ideas and information that most customers are looking for has remained fairly constant for thousands of years. In other words, you might use an online video to tell a potential buyer what you would have explained in a brochure 10 years ago, but the focus still needs to be on the right message, rather than on any one specific web design tool.

A good, high-quality business web design can easily last 3 to 5 years before it needs any major changes. If you find that you’re needing to redesign your business website a lot more often than not, it could be that you aren’t investing in quality layouts to start with, or are being too distracted by small changes, rather than concentrating on your most important business goals.

Having a new website for your company can be very exciting, but having one that helps you make more money month after month is usually a lot more rewarding.

To listen to most web design firms, the first thing you should do after upgrading or redesigning your small business website is to upgrade or redesign your small business website again. We say that jokingly, of course, but there’s an element of truth to it – it can easily feel like your site starts to get out dated the second it goes live, and web design companies are certainly happy to take your money when you decide it’s time for a change.

So when should you not decide to get a new small business website? Believe it or not, we can think of a few situations where it’s better to sit tight:

When you can’t afford quality web design work. Take it from a team of experienced professionals: trying to save a bunch of money by working with a bargain-basement web design company is almost always a bad idea. It’s not just that they’ll go through missed deadlines and ignored requirements; the end result will usually leave you wishing you just saved the little bit of money spent.

You can pay for a good site, but not enough of the features you really want. In the same way, the high-quality small business website is almost always an improvement if you have a design that isn’t working for you now. If you could wait just a little longer and get what you really need, though, that might be a better option. The last thing you want to do is spend a bunch of money to get a business site that you’ll want to replace three or six months down the road.

You’re already seeing record profits and sales online, and at a time when other businesses in your industry are struggling. There’s an old adage that you shouldn’t try to fix something that isn’t really broken, and that occasionally applies to small business web design. It’s okay to want to try some new features and keep up with the competition, but if you’re already blowing them out of the water, then be careful about making changes just for the sake of making changes.

More often than not, we meet business owners and marketing managers who are reluctant to make the changes and investments their businesses really need to go to the next level. If you don’t have the budget to do it right, however, or you’re already flying high above the pack, then don’t let anyone rush you into making the wrong decision.

Need one of Calgary’s best web design and online marketing teams working for you? Contact us at eKzact for a free consultation today!

It makes a lot of sense that when clients are looking for the very best in Calgary’s Web design, they tend to focus on the actual designs they see. But while looking through samples might be a good way to pick up on someone’s artistic flair, know that great web design doesn’t end once your site goes live… in fact, that’s really only the beginning.

Granted, the process of going from concepts to code, ideas to an actual, fully-functional website can be intense. But what happens once you’re online? A lot of business owners and marketing managers don’t think past that moment, even though it’s a virtual certainty that more help will be needed.

That’s because there are always going to be issues with the coding or design, updates to your company’s products or features, new security patches for your hosting software, e-mail and server issues, or any one of a thousand other things that will eventually lead you to pick up the phone. And that, as they say, is where your web design team is really going to earn its money.

What’s more, there could be challenges with your company’s website that don’t even have anything to do with “problems.” It could just be that your site becomes more popular and you need to find ways to promote it through social media, or that you are performing well in certain search engine terms but not others. Again, this is the place where the list could be endless; the only thing you can be sure of is that you’re going to eventually want some assistance.

There’s nothing wrong with evaluating designers and other creative teams first and foremost by the creative work they do. If you really want the best for your business, however, be sure to look beyond the design — because that’s where your web design project begins, but not where it ends.

If you’re looking for a team to design your company’s next website, make sure it gets found by potential customers, or simply get your business moving in the right direction online, contact eKzact — Calgary’s premier web design and online marketing partner.

As spring weather starts to move in, a lot of us will turn our thoughts to green grass, warmer temperatures, and maybe getting outside on the evenings and weekends. But if you can manage to focus a little bit of your time and energy on online marketing as the warmer days come, you might be surprised at how much you can accomplish while the rest of the world isn’t paying attention — and how much easier your summer months will feel with the hard work out of the way.

Here is a quick reminder of four areas where you might think about tuning up your business website this spring:

Refresh your search engine optimization plan. If you’re not showing up on one of the top few spots on Google or Yahoo for your most important keywords, then it’s very likely costing you a lot of money. Now is a great time to think about optimizing your site for the future.

Gather some steam on your social media profiles. More followers, better profiles, and frequent updates all make it easier to use sites like Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn to secure new customers. Make it your goal this spring to add one or two new contacts every day.

Add more online videos to your company’s site. Online videos don’t just help you sell more, but also create stronger brand awareness, decrease customer-service expenses, and improve traffic to your site. Why not take advantage of the new season by shooting a few high-quality clips?

Plan for some new web content. This is often the part of the year where all the grand plans and ideas people had at New Year’s start to lose some of the momentum. Take advantage of the warmer weather and give yourself a mental break, but also assess how you doing towards reaching your long-term goals and make a firm plan to get back on track if you need to do.

Want to start making your company more competitive online this spring? Find out how eKzact Web Design has helped so many other businesses in and around Calgary to meet their bottom-line goals.

WordPress sites are just about everywhere, and it’s not hard to understand why. For many, they represent the ultimate in good looking, “have it now” sites. In fact, on most hosting panels, it can be installed in just a few mouse clicks.

Instead of having to pay a designer, work on layouts and revisions, and then finally uploading your site, the budding online marketer can simply register a domain, install WordPress, pick a theme, and start selling on the web. Sounds just about perfect… right?

As someone who has designed websites and helped business owners to meet their marketing goals for more than a decade, I’m not so sure. The whole thing makes me more than a little concerned. There are a lot of reasons to think that WordPress sites might not be the fantastic value it seems to be at first sight.

Consider this:

Instant WordPress sites are easy, but they are usually far from customized. Just because something looks good at first glance doesn’t mean it’s right for your business. That’s especially true when dozens, hundreds, or thousands of other business owners might be using the exact same template. Do you really want your website to look like your competitors?

Consider also that your Calgary WordPress developer may be designing using non-design tools or WordPress theme generators that will undoubtedly restrict the potential creative outcome. Where the design and creative of a marketing website plays such an important role in converting visitors to potential clients this has to raise a red flag or two. The fact remains, just because you can open pictures on a computer and manipulate them, does not make you a designer.

And that limitation doesn’t just stop with aesthetics, either. Different sites, in different businesses, need different features and functionality. While WordPress has a large community of plug-in developers, finding, implementing and designing the look or plug-ins is not for the faint of heart.

Security can be a concern. An improperly installed WordPress installation can be a hacker magnet, not to mention a spammers heaven.  A seasoned website application programmer can insure that your WordPress installation is not vulnerable to attack.  Having a proper backup strategy and the ability to recreate your website should it be destroyed by a hacker is critically important and it requires someone who has more than an entry level knowledge of web applications to accomplish.

Deploying a cheap templated WordPress blog might be right for your budget now, but they’re usually wrong for the business. When it all comes down to it, this is really the big issue. For most businesses – even the small ones — the money that will be saved by using a cheap or free WordPress template isn’t ever going to come close to the amount they’ll lose by not having a professionally designed WordPress installation. While there are a lot of great ways to save cash when searching for web design or online marketing, going with something generic shouldn’t be one of them.

I can understand the pull of WordPress sites; they’re quick, cheap, and easy to put in place. But, just like most other things you could get for your business, the best investment usually isn’t the one that costs you the least and comes to you the fastest.

To answer the question, “But is it Effective?” – Yes, WordPress is hugely effective if it is properly deployed and designed with purpose.

Having a professionally installed and custom designed WordPress blog theme still does not have to break the bank.  The eKzact team can help you.

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David West began began his career as a freelance designer, later launching a full service website design and development company (eKzact.com) in Calgary, Alberta. He firmly believes that quality traffic is better than quantity, and has always used “coaching” approach to the development online strategies for his business clients. David’s clients especially love his “non-tech” way of talking about technical issues.

eKzact will be at the National Women in Business Expo in Calgary, Alberta on March 29th and 30th.

The Expo is intended to bring together women entrepreneurs, business professionals, opportunity seekers, work-at-home moms and women re-entering the workforce.

Come and meet Helen West, Sandy Thoen and me this coming weekend.

March 29 & 30, 2008
Stampede Park – Big Four Building

Are you a woman who is already running a business or thinking about starting a business? Are you interested in professional development and networking with like-minded women in your area?

We are Speaking at 2:30 pm on Sunday the 30th on the Expo floor.

“What You Need Your Website To Do For You”

Sandy and David know that designing a website for your business can be an overwhelming task. There is so much to learn and understand about web design, search engine optimization and drawing clients to your website. As a business owner or soon to be, you also know that if your business does not have a website, you cannot be found.

They will share with you how you can get your business online with an effective website that won’t break the bank. Topics that will be covered are, Planning Your Website, Getting Your Website to Work for You (lead generation), Search Engines & Marketing and Ownership of A Website – Do You Really Own It?

Several months ago we found a web service called Picnik. As calgary web developers who deliver “content management systems” to our clients, it was important to teach the client how to manipulate thier content images prior to placing them on their websites.

Before Picnik came along, the only option was to try to teach the clients how to use desktop software to crop and resize their images. These were the most common functions that the client needs to know. Most of the commonly needed funcitons that Picnik offers are FREE!

For an optional, and nominal, fee of $24.95 per year you can unlock the more advances features, fonts and techniques available to premium subscribers. It is well worth every penny. The team that developed, and continues to develop Picnik, deserve our support!

With the advent of Picnik, now it’s really fun teaching clients to use the web-based application! If you have a content managed website, blog or if you use facebook or any web based social network… you should give Picnik a try! (link is further down the page…)

Direct Quote From Picnik;

• Fix your photos in just one click
• Use advanced controls to fine-tune your results
• Crop, resize, and rotate in real-time
• Tons of special effects, from artsy to fun
• Astoundingly fast, right in your browser
• Awesome fonts and top-quality type tool
• Basketfuls of shapes from hand-picked designers
• Works on Mac, Windows, and Linux
• No download required, nothing to install

So, here it is… the link you have been waiting for!

Visit PICNIK.com Today!

Here are some screen shots of Picnik in action… all resized and edited in Picnik!

After developing websites and web-based applications for the greater part of the past decade, I have distilled the process down to four potential hurdles. The hurdles, or milestones, of web development are often the points where a project will stall. After all, if you can’t get over a hurdle, you can’t make it to the finish line.

The four hurdles;

1) Planning
2) Design
3) Content
4) Finish Line

The Planning Hurdle

Planning your web development project is a hurdle that is often skipped. Many prospective website clients rely on the web developer to tell them what they need. If you skip the planning phase of your project and leave the project deliverables up to the developer, it may become hard to overcome the last hurdle, which is the “Finish Line”. After all, if the project is not carefully planned from the begining, how will you or your developer ever know that it is finished?

Take the time to review your competition online. Make notes and prepare an outline for your website. If all you need is a marketing website, at minimum, define what pages you want and what the key message is for each of the pages. A content outline will be very helpful when you attempt to take you project over the “Content” hurdle.

The Design Hurdle

Your website design team will be tasked with creating the “look and feel” or theme for you new website. The more information that you can provide your creative team, at the begining of your project, the better the result will be. We have a carefully developed process that is intended to capture the essence of our clients design needs, at the start of their project. The design creative is a document that is refined until it finally goes to the designers, who use the creative briefing as a guide to reference when creating a new website theme.

Projects go sideways at the “Design” hurdle if the client is not prepared to speak to their business both from a technical as well as a social prospective. Research, by the client and the designer, prior to the start of the design project can greatly assist getting past this hurdle. One key here is the word “before”… Do the research before the designer starts. Don’t start doing research after your designer starts to design. The injection of new ideas after the initial design is started can stall the project.

The actual design and revisioning process for a website can often take a fair amount of time and is 100% dependant on the client being able to review a design and communicate clear feedback to the designer. It is crital that the client not confuse the “content” shown on early designs as “written in stone”. Early design reviews should concentrate on the theme, general colours, fonts, font sizes – the “look and feel” of the site. Don’t worry about the words on navigation points or titles early in the design process.

One point of stall, when it comes to the design hurdle, is the client who can not be designed for. Some clients, but fortunately very rarely, can not be designed for. They, simply put, will never be happy with a design concept for their business.

I have recently written another entry in this blog titled “Planning to Buy a Website?”. Please review it, as I speak in more detail regarding planning for your new website. It may help a prospective client to overcome both the “Planning” and the “Design” hurdles.

The Content Hurdle

A website is just a pretty picture, if there is no writing on it. The majority of small business clients make the choice to write their own website content, at the start of their project. Hiring a professional writer to develop content for your website can be expensive (but it doesn’t have to be), so the choice to write content yourself is often a safe choice, in terms of keeping a project on budget. Unfortunately, writing, even just five pages, is apparently much more difficult than some entrepreneurs anticipate.

Many projects will flail to a stall when we call the client to provide the content for their new website. Some clients actually disappear. The fact is, a lot of small business owners find that writing is much harder than they originally thought. Others are simply too busy to spend the time necessary for drafting their content.

When you start your website project, please know that there are options when it comes to the written content for your website. You certainly can write your own content. Start right away, write a little bit at a time and keep chipping away at it until you are done. Ask a peer to review your writing. Or, if you don’t want to pay for professional writing you can substantially reduce the cost of a professional writer if you provide the writer with a full outline of your proposed content. The writer then acts more like an editor and can usually refine your thoughts and ideas into very professional copy. The reduced time required can save you money and the results can be quite good. The other option is to consider the true value that hiring a professional writer can bring to your project, and just do it.

I am not going to labour on about the importance of the text content on your website in this article. I will just say it once… a website without quality content will not surface on search engine results.

The Finish Line

The final hurdle to overcome is the “Finish Line” hurdle. Your new website has to go live on the internet. Some clients feel as though once their website is online there is no turning back. Once your site is live, it is not frozen in time like an oil painting. Unlike printed advertising, a website is easy to update and change. This is especially true of a website that is developed using a content management system that allows the client to make changes without the input of their webmaster.

When a website production is 98% completed, with only minor formatting to refine, set it live. A reputable web developer will allow you time to make final revisions and content updates for a period of time after a new site is launched, usually without additional fees. eKzact actually provides clients with a warrently for the post-production period of new websites. We continue to work closely with the clients to fix any content formatting or scripting issues for this “warrently period” to ensure that the client is completely satisfied with their new website.

Don’t stall getting your new website live, over minor issues. Get it live, get it working for you, and then work through the final revisions. Don’t miss opportunities by not getting your site live. This post-production grace period, that our client get, is also a great opportunity to get other people to review your new website and include some of their observations into your final revision task.

Only a Team Can Overcome These Hurdles

There are some key ingredients that every successful website design and development project requires. Two ingredients are critical, and if either one of them is missing, your project will most assuradely stall on one of the four hurdles noted above.

The two main ingredinets are a “professional developer” and “the clients participation” in the project. Without a doubt, a project where either of these two stakeholders loses interest, will not make it to the “Finish Line”.

Preparation is key to receiving useful proposals from web developers. Not only will a bit of preparation help you get more detailed propsals, but it is more likely that you will be able to compare the pricing – apples to apples.

A great number of prospective website design clients do very little preparation prior to calling web designers. They tend to search online for a web designer and then start down the list. Some call, others fill out the request for proposal “form” that is commonly found on web designers websites. The website developer will control the interview, or the form will drive the questions. There will be no consistency, conversations will go in different directions, forms are all unique – proposals and pricing will come back to the prospective client as varied as the colours in a rainbow. One of our prospective clients, last year, received three proposals for their new website, prior to choosing eKzact. The client later confided in me that the pricing ranged from $3,500 up to $10,000.00. Presumably these prices were all for the same website.

A lot of small business owners decide to research getting a website, but it seems that the first place a lot of them begin their research is at the top ranking website design company websites. While this may seem a logical place to begin, I would recommend that you begin by developing a simple specification for your website. Do a basic “needs” analysis.

Research Your Competitors

I would strongly suggest that you open a web-browser, go to Google.com and search for your competition. Look for other businesses that are online, and doing what you do. Start a list of “competative websites” for analysis by your prospective web developer. Beside the website address, make note of the following;

• What you like about the site (best practices)
• Are there any components on the site that will help you generate leads for your business?
• Are there any forms on the website that your business should have on it’s website?
• Speak to the general design of the competitors website design (look and feel)… do you like it or not? What do you like?

Do the search again mixing in demographic words like City or Province names. This will return more business websites in your industry, but not necessarily in your immediate area.

The more websites you look at, related to your industry, the better you will be prepared to tell your prospective web designer what your business needs are. A skilled web developer will do some of this research for you, but it is still recommended that you make the effort before starting your project.

Research Websites “in General”

Do another search on Google.com now… use the keywords “nicely designed business websites”, or something similar. Google will return a “result set” of websites for you to surf. I recommend that you look at lots of websites

Make more notes. This time, you are looking at the general website layouts, colour themes and textures. Try to find example websites that have a “look and feel” that appeals to your business sense. Keep in mind that you are developing a website for your business – not for yourself.

Who Is Your Target Visitor?

A business website should appeal to the prospective website visitor – not the business owner. Make note of who your typical client is and what “environment” will appeal to them. For example, if you are developing a website to attract new apprentices into an Iron Workers local, then it is not likely that rosey pinks and reds will appeal to the visitors.

Make notes about the types of images that will help to communicate to your website visitors. Visit a website like Dreamstime and search for images realated to your business and list the image serial numbers as examples for your designer. Don’t buy the images, just use the reference number.

Generation of Leads

Once the visitor arrives at your website, what do you need them to do? Is it important to you that people phone you when they come to your website? Do you want them to complete a survey and then receive a free report about your industry? Do you want the visitor to register? Reqest a proposal?

This is a critially important area for your new website. There is a multitiude of opportunities for a website to become a lead generating tool for your business. A professional website developer will have a lot of different ideas for lead generation – but come prepared with some ideas.

Conclusion

Most professional web development companies will have some strong recommendatios for you. We have the advantage of having designed and developed several websites every months. The more you prepare, prior to asking a web developer for pricing, the better the resulting proposals will be.

A company like eKzact has a full compliment of Internet Consultants, project managers, web designers, programmers, search engine optimizers and online marketers. Visit our business website here…