If you’re searching for a company to create a website for your business, shopping by price is the dumbest thing you can do. Keep reading to find out why that statement is true while simultaneously letting this article make you money.

For the purposes of this article, I’m going to use the blanket term “web design” to mean the design of a website (graphic work), and to a lesser extent custom programming, and a touch of Internet marketing.

Hot Web Design + Great Internet Marketing = Your Website Makes You Money

I honestly do not believe that most businesses realize how much work goes into building a high quality website that makes them money.

Why bother having a company website if you don’t let it present you as an outstanding company to do business with? Serious companies should take their websites (and Internet presence) seriously. I frequently field inquiries from a range of people who either get it or don’t.

Clients Who Don’t Get It

Unfortunately, I get many calls from people who just want to have a website to check it off of their list of things to do. These individuals often treat it like a chore, don’t really want to learn about the possibilities that await them in the Internet world, and yet expect results beyond reason. These people are often in a rush and don’t realize what it takes to professionally achieve what they want.

A typical “rush” call goes like this:

Potential Client: “I need to launch a website that has to have full e-commerce capabilities, a little flash, and [insert 1990s-style, gimmicky item here]. I need it by next week.”
Me: “No problem! Call my competitors. I’m sure they’ll be more than happy to help you!”

At which point they’re blown away that I’m not jumping all over the project. Why would I be? The person has made it clear that he doesn’t know what he wants, doesn’t appreciate what it will take to get the job done, wants it done in a week, and lacks the understanding that without an Internet marketing component, the website isn’t going anywhere. I’ve been down that road. I’ve been doing what I do since the 1990s and I can tell that without these points, within a few months of launch, the client would cancel the project anyways seeing as how they didn’t get a return on their investment.

Not to mention that clients in a rush are often the worst to deal with because their disorganization somehow becomes your emergency and stress levels go through the roof. Who needs that?! I want to sleep at night, stress-free.

Clients Who Do Get It

I work with many companies (of all sizes) and organizations who understand their business, truly want to make a profit and recognize that the Internet is an advertising source that does not offer guarantees but can be extremely lucrative. The ones who listen to my team’s advice typically generate the greatest return on their investments. Coincidentally, these same clients are those who have a viable business model and are ready to work on and invest in something of high quality.

In other words, these clients understand that working with a team of professionals who are open-minded, very experienced, and can answer difficult questions with honest, detailed answers on the spot and/or make corrections and adjustments quickly, is invaluable.

Working WITH Clients

On the other hand, I also get calls from many excellent companies who are very professional and working together, we get the job done to everyone’s satisfaction. That’s why I do what I do.  I’m not here to nickle and dime every last cent out of my clients for the services they don’t need. Rather, I’m here to do what I enjoy doing, excel at it, and help clients get the most out of their Internet marketing investment. A large, important, yet far too often overlooked part of that is the design of the client’s website.

My services are specialized. Rushing and bargaining only serves to demonstrate that as a potential client, you do not see the inherent value that I bring to the table. As one of my clients, Gerard Nierenberg (Forbes calls him The Father of Negotiation) has taught me, business relationships can be about everyone winning. They don’t have to be a one-up scenario. I have adopted this attitude into my company policies. I work with clients on a win-win basis. If you want a cut above and see the value in it, you should be prepared to pay for it. If you want the lowest price for any garbage that can be produced, go to my competitors.

Web Design is Not a Chocolate Bar

The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines a commodity as “a good or service whose wide availability typically leads to smaller profit margins and diminishes the importance of factors (as brand name) other than price.”

As a serious company, you can’t treat web design like a chocolate bar.

Web design is not:

• A low investment (of time, finances, etc)
• An easily bought and sold item
• Decided through spontaneity and whims
• Something you ask your cousin’s friend to do for your business for $100 because he knows how to use MySpace

Web design is:

• A process that involves a strategy (if you intend to make money with your website, directly or indirectly)
• A talent that requires experience
• A demonstration of true understanding of your goals (when done properly)
• An important part of persuading clients to buy from you
• An understanding of themes, colours, fonts, screen sizes, browser compatibility, usability, function, coding, and more

While surfing the Internet, every single day you land on websites that are either ugly, difficult to use, don’t appear trustworthy, make it difficult to find what you’re looking for, and generally make the process unpleasant and frustrating. Further, in many cases your searches require a lot of digging through search engine results pages to get what you want. That’s because far too many web designers miss the mark. In fact, most don’t even know where the mark is. Instead they shoot in the dark and hope it works.

For example, a website that is designed for a cosmetic plastic surgeon should be “soft” in feel whereas a machinery parts manufacturing plant website will likely have a “rougher” feel to it. It typically takes experience to get the balance right but either way, launching a random website where the generic design could represent any business by simply changing the logo isn’t necessarily the best way to go.

These Can’t Easily Be Bought & Sold With High ROI Potential

Strategy
A professional will take the time to listen to your needs, generate ideas that you haven’t thought of, and provide a cohesive plan of action.

Skill Type
Your friend’s daughter who completed her degree in fashion design should be able to design your website because she knows about design, right? Wrong. The smartest clients understand that designing for a website is nothing like any other form of design. You may be great at designing dresses, houses, hotel rooms, brochures, or even logos, but that doesn’t automatically qualify you as a competent web designer.

Skill Level
Let’s face it. The majority of websites have a dated, ugly design to them. Yes, I’m a bit of a design snob but even looking conservatively, most websites don’t work nearly as well as they should to sell your brand, products, and services. Quality web design is typically produced by quality web designers. People with real skills charge real prices. If your budget is a few hundred dollars, hire a freelancer and don’t expect an experienced company to do the job for you.

Analysis of the Big Picture
The ability to look at the big picture is invaluable. Your neighbour’s son, a high school student who dabbles in “web design” doesn’t even come close to understanding what your short- and long-term business needs are.

Answer Questions
Do you want your questions answered? Do you want to wait for that answer? It takes a LOT of time to learn about and experience all of the issues that arise when developing a website. Years, in fact. A real business will be ready to pay for instant access to answers to important web design questions.

SEO
Hiring someone without proven SEO experience is a big mistake. Do-it-yourself turnkey operations are popping up all over the place promising instant riches and easy money for all. Read some of the truth about SEO and SEO business mistakes.

Code: HTML, PHP, CSS, Jquery, Ajax, APIs, Etc
Is your web designer still building an entire website in HTML tables? That’s old hat. New technologies have emerged and CSS is where it’s at for styling a website. If your website was built in the last couple of years and its basic structure is tables, you’re missing out. You see, it takes time and effort to keep up with the trends in this industry. Most business people aren’t expected to keep up, but we are. Experience and knowledge are easily upgraded.

Ongoing Maintenance
A company that’s been around for years is more likely to be able to manage your website than a freelancers who are often overwhelmed with work or underwhelmed and have to take a second job (meaning no time for you).

Stiffed on Domain Names
Don’t trust the guy in the apartment next door to register your domain name for you. He’ll be gone before you know it and you won’t have any way to contact him. Trust me – I’ve dealt with this exact situation at least a dozen times. Wouldn’t you sleep better at night knowing that you own your domain name and that it’s not at risk?

The best web design companies are businesses just like yours and deserve to be paid accordingly.

Internet Explorer 6 doesn’t even explore anymore. It just kind of stumbles around!  It’s time for IE6 to just die already!If you’re reading this and you’re not sure what IE6 is, are fully aware of what it is, or why I’m calling for the death of something, read on…

What is IE6?

Here’s a summary of the basics:

• IE6 is Internet Explorer version 6
• It’s a web browser that allows you to surf the Internet (just in case there are noobs reading this who don’t realize IE6 is bad for us all)
• It was launched on August 27, 2001
• The next version of Internet Explorer 7 (IE7) was released in October 2006 (5 YEARS after IE6)
• The current version is IE8 which was released in March 2009

In technology terms, IE6 is a dinosaur and it’s time for it to go extinct. It was released before the iPhone, the first season of American Idol, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, and 9-11. Let’s face it, this browser is old!

The Problem

There are several key issues surrounding the IE6 browser. First, a small percentage of people surfing the Internet still use it, most not realizing that it’s completely out of date. These same people visit websites wondering why so many web designs suck but in reality, it’s just their experience using the browser that makes it appear that way. As technology has evolved, so have web design methods and styles, making the user experience more interesting and stimulating, if you’re using an updated browser.

Next, its creator, Microsoft, refuses to end support for it. By continuing to support security updates and adding to it from time to time, and not forcing people to upgrade, the problems will continue indefinitely.

Internet Explorer’s arch enemy is the Mozilla Firefox browser. When Firefox has an update, they operate in the oposite direction, with annoying “update now” messages that appear when you use it. At least, these keep most people up to date. I say most because according to some of the websites I manage, I still see a tiny percentage of people visiting from older versions of Firefox.

Worse for the Web Design Industry

My team and I work very hard to satisfy clients. In doing so, we spend an enormous amount of time getting our “fancy shmancy” websites to look great on many browsers. The problem here is that testing for cross-browser compatibility costs me and you a lot of money. Professional testing for how a website looks in IE6 is extremely time consuming and someone has to pay for that time. Given the browser’s low market share, it’s really not worth it anymore.

Another factor that is an issue for us is that it doesn’t support the many CSS features, making web programming more complex than it needs to be.

Perhaps the worst part is that IE6 does not have the ability to properly display transparet PNG images. As such, IE6 users will see big blocks of blank squares on their pages, rather than attractive images. Without knowing better, they’d sooner blame the designer for their poor experience on a website. This certainly cuts into the persuasive part of my Internet success model.

The Solution

Kill IE6! Microsoft should stop supporting it and force upgrades to the latest version of windows Internet Explorer.

The Kill IE6 Movement

Governments and the corporate world are starting to take a stand against the continued use of Internet Explorer 6. Here are some of the highlights:

• In January 2010, Google announced that they would no longer support it.
• YouTube which is owned by Google has announced that their support will end soon as well.
• The governments of France and Germany take the issue seriously and have called for the demise of IE6.

How did Microsoft respnond to all of this? They’ve extended IE6 Support to 2014! Arg!

What it Means to You

Not much aside from the fact that you’ll have a better browsing experience by not using IE6. If you run a very busy website, you need to look at your stats and consider who’s visiting the site. If you still see a large (“large” is a relative term, I know) amount of visitors still using it, you may want to have a pop-up window telling them to update to IE7 or IE8 (or the “latest version”). Otherwise, you could try to account for IE6 but it’s a losing battle in my opinion.

Most importantly, a better browser experience.

That said, I’ll break down three areas worthy of a definition. Before the SEO people and web design people blast these definitions, I ask you, the reader, to keep in mind that they are pretty broad. But you get the idea.

Web Designer

First, there was the web designer! A web designer’s role is typically to design a website graphically, cut up the design and insert it into a template format using HTML and CSS. They may add programming to a site but anything significant is typically performed by a website developer with specialized training in programming. Programs that web designers often use include Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and direct hard-coding programs as simple as notepad. Either way, most web designers suck because basic web design is fairly easy to learn and “anyone can do it” but anything substantial requires real commitment and most people simply aren’t that committed. Although the time is coming for companies to hire the real deal if they want to make money as the Internet becomes much more competitive.

SEO

Then the search engine optimization (SEO) people came along. Early on they learned to register with search engines, use a meta-tag generator (and “just this code to your website and it will work”) and of course, buy links for people and wait for website rankings to rise. As SEO become increasingly complex, important, and difficult to implement properly, we entered the era of the SEO web designer.

SEO Web Designer

Finally, SEO web designers entered our lives. Since SEO cannot be taught in school, they consisted mainly of forward thinking web designers (and in fact came from many areas of Internet-related professions, making the concept of what it means to be an “SEO” a somewhat difficult one to define).

The SEO web designer is the one you want. You no longer want someone who just knows about design but rather the person who reads the research and figures out what makes people find your site and buy from your company, based on the design. Sadly, to this day, there are actually web designers who have never heard of SEO or don’t know the first thing about the topic and still expect to make a living.

Next, the social media people wandered in. But that’s a whole other story.