Website Design

Logic dictates that your website be based on your message, market and competition. The job of website designer as artist is to create a look that reflects your business and philosophy in a pleasing format. The job of website designer as technician requires the orderly display of information in a logical and transparent manner. The message begins with the home page.

A good home page is a little like a book cover. No one buys a book because of a good looking cover (the exception being a beautiful damsel being chased by a great white shark). What a good book cover does is to get the reader to pick up the book. A good home page gets the visitor to pause long enough to determine whether this site offers the information the visitor searched for.

Firestar Design Company constructs each website using hand-coded HTML and original designed art to insure that each website:

• Looks good (eye candy to attract immediate attention).
• Is easily navigated so visitors (impatient and easily frustrated) stay long enough to find what they are searching for.
• Display relevant and informative content so visitors take further steps to contact you.

Elements of good website design, marketing and operation includes artwork, layout, color, hosting server, server software, design software, aggressive marketing and strict programming language as necessary components to achieve a stated goal: "Create Bonds with Website Visitors and Convert Them To Customers"

We feel very strongly that each customer become the owner of all elements of a completed website. Once completed we provide our customers with copies of original artwork and HTML and work with them to insure they have the quality to be used for other purposes (print, advertising, etc.). Elements we do not transfer to customers include all back end programming and software necessary to physically operate the website (database, e-mail, automatic photograph conversion, etc.).

Customer Oriented Web Design

The novelty of the "World Wide Web" has worn off. Once a trendy medium used to display interests, hobbies and fetishes, the Internet has evolved into a commercial marketplace where more and more people care about value, convenience and ease of use. Most commercial websites built a few years ago were not concerned about an interactive computer interface used to supply customers with information, they were an advertising gimmick necessary to make your company appear to be on the cutting edge.

Today, the focus has shifted to powerful websites that provide real value and deliver a positive customer experience. When your website consistently receives accolades for valuable content, ease of navigation and use, smooth performance and competence, you know you have achieved Customer Oriented Web Design.

Using Customer Oriented Web Design your website is designed with the purpose of displaying those features your customers are searching for in a way they can easily understand. It sounds very simple but you must build the site right to build the right site! We have had some success in this area, but have had our failures. Most of the time it simply boiled down to the fact that our customers did not want to put in the time, effort or money it takes to make a truly successful website.

People will leave your website if they:

Hand Built -vs- Template Design

At first glance, the difference between hand built and template design sites seems obvious. Everyone knows the difference between a Rolls Royce and a Yugo. You would have to be judgementally impaired to not prefer the former over the latter. When it comes to website design, the determining factor of which type of site to build usually boils down to the same factor as the choice of cars ... price.

There is only one problem with this approach. How many template-design websites have you noticed at the top of Search Engines?

A little common sense dictates that you need a level of service somewhere in the middle. Firestar Design have placed themselves in a niche to provide large design firm features without the high costs associated with such firms. To do this, we have placed a primary emphasis on design by hand-coding all our HTML and designing all our customer artwork. This allows us to gain a lot of benefit when indexed by search engines and makes the job of marketing much easier.

We actually spend more time doing the initial website building than many other firms, but feel the advantage we gain far outweighs the extra time spent on construction. This also allows us to include items our customers feel necessary for their website, a feature most template design companies do not offer. We actually feel our customers know their own customer base far better than we do and know what items they want on a website that features their strengths.

Having A Website Strategy

The days of having a few single pages devoted to your entire operation are over. When working with search engines, you'll want to make sure that what your pages are about matches what the engines believe your pages are about which also matches what other sites believe your pages are about.

So, set up additional Web pages for different areas of your company. If you sell sports equipment, set up a site for hunting equipment, one for fishing, for baseball, and so forth. Interlink them together, carefully controlling how you're describing the links pointing to those other pages.

Make the overall design of your pages the same, so that customers will not have to learn new navigation features or layout each time they go to a new page.

It is just as important to understand why visitors are leaving your website than it is to understand why they remain.

This maxim is an important feature of website strategy. One of the nice things about working with customers that already have websites is that we have the opportunity to identify and fix existing problems. Many of the nightmare scenarios we hear are actually caused by a lack of overall strategy for the website.

Something that may seem obvious to you may not occur to our design team. We like to talk with our customers 3 or 4 times during the course of the year to see how you want to improve their website. By spending a couple of hours working with you during these talks, we are able to adapt the strategies necessary to keep you in a dominant search engine position.

If you wish to find out more about website design or just want to talk, please Contact Firestar Design.