web from start to results

Be Creative

A web presence is by definition an opportunity to get creative and to present a kind of art form in the process of communicating about your information, products or services. Having said that, I need to assert that creativity needs to be held in tension with the other essential goal of website development which is effective marketing, i.e. providing the necessary information to persuade and convince website visitors to buy your product or service or to make the response to your information that you desire.

While not wanting to oversimplify the challenge we face to develop creative website content, we summarise our services into the following three categories.

  • Dynamic and Static Imagery

This includes the layout of your website and its constituent pages including colour, graphic artistry, choice of static images including their sizing, dynamic imagery including video, flash, GIF files, etc., and the balance between image and text. We also include here forms used to collect data from visitors and form design.

As you see, there are many possible components to the imagery that may be presented in a website and its constituent pages.

One approach that can be used to begin addressing this challenge is to buy pre-designed website templates. Be aware the free ones available typically are dated and are offered for free because they are not currently popular.

Those familiar with Photoshop and with an artistic bent may make progress in achieving good balance in creating their own website designs, if they can incorporate this into the necessary code.

However, the general rule of thumb is to leave the basic website design and incorporation of imagery to the experts. They know and are experienced in what they do and will usually do it in a fraction of the time you will.

Value Websites and MyURL will always strongly recommend that we be allowed to do the base level design for your website for these reasons.

  • Copywriting

I suggest that more important than website layout and imagery are the words that are placed on our web pages to (pre) sell our products, services and information. As well as being our most persuasive promotional tools, the right words go far in convincing the search engines to give us higher rankings for our key words and phrases.

Wordsmithing has develop as a crucial website design discipline. Visitors and potential customers do not read web pages like they read literature like books, newspapers or magazines, even written reports. They skim read and are looking to be hooked by us providing information they want. We usually have very little time to convince them that we have something worthwhile to offer them. I'm not talking only about the body text but also about the importance of well chosen headings, coherent and logical menu structures, clear pathways indicating what I, the visitor, should do next to get what I am looking for.

The issue in all of this is "usability". Is our website optimised to be user friendly and the kind of place I should hang out in? We may have as little as ten seconds to communicate with our visitor that s/he should look around here further.

At Value Websites we have heaps of experience as communicators both in the offline and online worlds. Talk to us further about our copywriting services. Perhaps you would like us to have a look at some of the content of your website. We'd be very happy to make some objective and creative suggestions for improvements.

Always when we develop websites we place a huge emphasis on the textual content.

  • Ongoing Content Management

The job has only just begun when you launch your website into cyberspace. The day after you publish it, it has become out of date! Sorry, the challenge to manage your site is constant and urgent. That's why user/owner Content Management Systems (CMS) have been developed. No longer is it acceptable for web developers to cream clients with ongoing detailed editing of your website. That is increasingly becoming a staffing issue. While some ongoing management of your website may need the attention of your website professional, much of it is easily taught and left to trained staff. Adding news, events, sending web marketing content or other emails, updating photo galleries or creating, attaching and linking PDF files are all tasks that should be in the job descriptions of key staff. Higher level editing and upgrades need to be discussed and appropriate responsibilities be allocated.

Our Value Websites'  Woogloo websites come with an user-friendly CMS. Check out how we approach the issue of ongoing content management. Our philosophy is always to allow, facilitate and encourage clients to do as much of their own content management as possible,