In today’s blog we look at how to find a good Bedford website design company.

Professional web designers who create really eye-catching websites can charge thousands of pounds for a few simple pages. At the other end of the scale, low-price outfits can create a website for you but it may not meet your requirements.

If you consider the following steps you will be well on the way to ensuring a web designer is suitable for your needs.

1. Check their website for a portfolio. You should like their own site and the sites thay have built for clients. Beware any broken links – if they can’t get their own sites right, how are they going to do a good job for you?

2. Browse their websites with different browsers – Microsoft Internet Explorer, Firefox and Google Chrome are the three most popular browsers. The websites should look equally good on all three.

3. Check how the sites rank in Google. SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) is important and cannot be overlooked. A good website will have pages with a clear structure that are easy for search engines to rank.

4. Ask the designer about intellectual property ownership. The ownership should be yours – you have paid for it. You should not pay the original designer any more if you want to make changes to your pages. Of course, you would expect to pay the designer if s/he does the work for you.

These are four simple steps that you should follow to save yourself a lot of time and money later when commissioning your Bedford website design.

When building or specifying your Bedford website design, you may find it useful to use templates. A template is a starting point on which you can build your own site.

There are many places on the Internet where you can get templates for free (do a Google search) – the usual condition of use is that you keep the author’s/designer’s copyright statement on your page. Many website design companies have a range of templates from which you can choose.

Most templates are coded using HTML. These are the easiest to edit to meet your specific requirements.

WordPress is a popular free service for creating blogs (this series of articles uses WordPress), but it can equally well be used to create websites (technically there’s little difference), and it comes with thousands of templates.

When you go to WordPress, you will find that their templates are grouped according to themes for different types of use (art, business, style, etc).

Many website design companies have templates from which their customers can choose a style; and they may well have a portfolio of sites they have designed and you could choose one of these as a starting point.

The great advantage of using themes is the saving of time and money – much better than starting off with a blank screen.

Some people use templates to design a basic layout of their website and then hand this over to their designer or website design company. But if you feel more confident you may well find that you can do all the work yourself.

To summarise: before you commit to spending money on your Bedford website design, look for free resources on the Internet, especially templates.

But if it’s all too much, you need to call in the experts. Be sure to read our next article Bedford Website Design Tip Number 8 – Finding a Good Designer.

When you enlist the help of a specialist company to create your Bedford website design, you need to check the scope of what they’ll do for you. One of the key areas is keeping your site up to date.

Will they do it for you as part of the service? It may be free for six months or a year, but you pay after that.

Will they charge you from the word go, so that all changes after your site goes live will result in you receiving a bill? You need to know how much they will be charging, before you give them the OK to build your website.

Or will they give you the tools to do the job yourself – in which case, do you have the time and the technical know-how to take this on?

If your website is one that can easily become out of date (for example, if it lists events of any kind), then it helps your visitors if you put a “date last updated” on it.

If you link to other websites, it is worth checking every now and again that the links still work. Other sites can very easily disappear, or get redesigned so that particular pages are no longer there.

It goes without saying that links within your own website must all work. Nothing is worse than having a broken link when you try to get to another page on your site. So if any changes are done to your site, make sure everything still works before one of your visitors finds the fault.

To summarise, check if your Bedford website design company will keep your site up to date, and on what terms; and do your own checks to make sure that internal and external links still work.

Want a shortcut to designing your web site? Try using templates – see our next tip in this series, Bedford Website Design Tip Number 7 – Using Templates.

Today we look at how you should write the text you give your Bedford website design company.

Tip Number 5 – More on Writing Style

When you commission a website design company, the chances are that you will be asked to provide the text that appears on your website. Here are some basic rules that will make your pages more readable.

DO NOT USE CAPITAL LETTERS FOR ALL OF YOUR TEXT. In fact, it’s best to avoid capital letters altogether, except where the rules of grammar demand them (first letter of a sentence, proper nouns, etc). Long strings of capital letters are harder to read than lower case.

Do not go overboard with exclamation marks! They are usually unnecessary, and there is no reason whatever for three of them!!! Littering your text with exclamation marks is irritating to the reader, and doesn’t really help you get your message across.

We would allow a very limited exception to the above for headline-style text, where you want to grab attention to a special offer or something like that. Then you could have 4 or 5 words in capitals with exclamation marks. But please keep this usage to an absolute minimum.

Do use a spell checker before you hand your text over to the design company. The design company is unlikely to correct any errors in your text – they will just copy it into the web page. So if you type Bedfrod instead of Bedford, that’s what will appear on your website. This means you must type your text into a word processor such as Word or Open Office. Nothing is worse than a page full of spelling errors. As a final check, get someone else to read it – you, having written it, will be “blind” to any errors.

A summary of what your Bedford website design company will want from you: text that has been spell-checked, typed in normal lower case text NOT CAPITAL LETTERS, and no exclamation marks.

Designing your web site is one thing, keeping it up-to-date is another. Be sure to read Bedford Website Design Tip Number 6 – Who Will Keep Your Site Up To Date?

In today’s post about finding a Bedord website design company, we are still in the planning stage, and we look at the do’s and dont’s of colours and line length.

Tip Number 4 – Make Your Text Readable

Don’t use dark colour text on dark backgrounds – red text on the dark blue of Bedford School or red on black are horrendously difficult to read. If you are doing colour text, make sure there is high contrast between the text and the background. Dark text on a light background is easier to read then light text on a dark background.

Be very very careful with background images. If you are going to use them, there’s a danger that the background will be too dark to read the text properly. Do a bit of work with your photo-editor to reduce the depth of colour of the image.

Don’t make lines of text too long. Think how printed media compose their pages – they use columns. So should you. Keep the column width to 600 pixels.

Page width is a different situation. A width limit of 1000 pixels is good for the standard 1024×768 pixel monitor. Fit columns into this. It should be possible to read the page without having to use the scroll bar to scan across the width of the page.

Summing up today’s tip about planning your Bedford website design: get the colours and the line lengths right – Make Your Text Readable.

Readability isn’t just about the text format and colour, it’s also about style. Make sure to read Bedford Website Design Tip Number 5 – More on Writing Style.

In the latest of our series about looking for a Bedford website design company, we look at controlling how long it takes for images to appear on the screen.

Tip Number 3 – Small Images Are Faster

It’s nice to design your website with photographic images. But be aware that your snazzy multi-megapixel digital camera will be taking photos that are many, many times larger than you need for a website. For example, a 2 megapixel image of 1600 x 1200 pixels will give you a high quality print of 6 x 4 or 7 x 5 inches, and an acceptable print of 8 x 10 inches (office size paper).

Displayed on a medium quality screen, 1600 x 1200 will come out at about 17 inches wide!

The normally accepted “safe” size for a full web page is a mere 800 x 600 pixels, as there are still a lot of old monitors out there dating from the days before wide screens came along. So let’s say you want an image that takes up only a quarter of this safe page width, then you are looking at an image size of 200 x 150 – only one sixty-fourth of the number of pixels we started with.

Now you can leave your original image untouched, and let your visitor’s browser do the hard work to shrink the image. But even if your visitor has broadband, this is not a good thing to do. Why take 64 times longer to dish up 64 times what your visitor actually needs?

Much better to use your photo-editor to shrink the image – some can come off by cropping it, the rest by resizing it. And this way, you have complete control over what and how your image is displayed.

Of course, some sites (artistic, photographic, architectural … ) do need larger images. But for these you can create thumbnail images (with your photo-editing software) and give the viewer the option of clicking through to a detailed view.

So when you are planning your Bedford website design, don’t be a band-width hog: keep your images small.

Now that you’ve sorted out your images, check that your text is OK. Be sure to read Bedford Website Design Tip Number 4 – Make Your Text Readable.

Today in our series about looking for a Bedford website design company, we look at how your visitors are going to get from one page to another and back again.

Tip Number 2 – Get me out of here! Make it easy to find things.

If you are going to have more than one page, then it needs to be easy to get to that page. It also needs to be easy to get back to the first (“home”) page.

So ask yourself again, do you actually need more than one page?

For a start, don’t have one of those home pages that says “Welcome to My Website …. click here to enter”. This is totally unnecessary. If your visitor knocks at your door, don’t put another door in the way. Just take them to the first real content page.

Limit the length of pages, so that visitors don’t have to scroll down too far. Unless you’re writing a lengthy article, try to limit your page length to the equivalent of 2 screens long. Articles could probably be as long as 6 or so screens long.

Have a menu on each page – for example, a list in the left-hand column.

Have a way of finding “Home” on every page. There is also a convention that a company logo in the top left-hand corner contains a clickable link to the home page.

There’s another convention that says links are in blue text and underlined. So don’t use different colours for links, and don’t use blue underlined text for things that are not links.

Avoid the use of “click here” links. Make the text of the link describe the page that’s being linked to.

• Right way:

Check out our catalogue, seasonal products and gift ideas.

• Wrong way:

For our catalogue click here. For seasonal products click here. For gift ideas click here.

To sum up, when you are planning your Bedford website design, don’t leave your visitors screaming “Get me out of here!”

The next tip is all about how to get your photos and other images in the right format for putting on your web site. Be sure to read Bedford Website Design Tip Number 3 – Small Images Are Faster.

Looking for a Bedford website design company? Before you start, you should plan your website before you actually talk to anyone about building it. This means some thinking is required about what each page is going to say and how your visitors are going to get from one page to another and back again.

Tip Number 1 – Content is king: make sure each page says something useful.

It’s pointless making a page pretty or flashy if it contains nothing of use to a site visitor.

Attention spans on the internet are limited. Most visitors skim the page rather than read it.

So your pages must be clear, easy to read (more about this in a later post) and above all have something useful or interesting to say, if it’s mainly text – or show, if it’s mainly images.

Quite often, it’s possible to get all the information you need to display into one simple straightforward web page, without it looking cramped. An unscrupulous design company may say you need 4 or 5 pages when just one will do, because they can charge more that way. But when you think about it, a small business may only need to advertise what they do and how to contact them – this does not need 5 pages.

So when you start thinking about getting a Bedford website design company to create a website for you, remember the well-known catchphrase “Content is king”.

The next thing to consider is how your readers will navigate around your web site. Be sure to read Bedford Website Design Tip Number 2 – Get me out of here!

This blog is for anyone thinking of getting a Bedford website design company to professionally design your business or personal website. You will find  a series of short articles explaining what to look for when having your website designed. You will also learn how to find the right Bedford website design company for you.

We will give advice on topics such as:

• what makes well-constructed, effective website design and what to avoid
• how  much Bedford website design companies are likely to charge
• what to look out for in a good website designer
• how to find the right website design company for you
• services provided by website design companies that will give your website top search engine rankings
• and much much more …

which will help you get a top-notch website and excellent value for money when you commission a Bedford website design company.