Did You Miss Us?

Last week, in honor of Good Friday and Easter, we took a holiday from our newsletter duties, but we're back! Hope everyone got a great big chocolate bunny and nobody ate the ears before you did!

Should You Do It Yourself?

Why not design your own website? Can't you do it as well as anyone else? The answers are a qualified maybe. It really all depends on you.

There are software programs that you can buy or that are available for use through websites that allow you  to create a very rudimentary site all by yourself, producing the programming code (often limited to HTML) for you, in the background. You never have to see the code if you don't want to.

If your site will be a very simple one without requiring you to know any of the web design programming code such as HTML, ASP, ColdFusion, Etc., then that's one hurdle you're over. If you need functions beyond the program's capabilities, do you learn how to write the code, do you buy additional software as an add-on to do it for you, or do you punt?

If you are truly a creative and artistically inclined person with a natural flare for putting together not only a very good looking product, but also a site with the qualities that make a site exceptional, including ease of navigation and useful content in the form of graphics and text, just to name a couple of important considerations, maybe you're ready to tackle it on your own.

As professionals, we see bad websites everyday as we browse the Internet. People using software such as Microsoft's FrontPage™ use the "themes" provided with their bullets, navigation bars, backgrounds, and colors to produce sites that look an awful lot like what everyone else using that program, or others pretty much like it, have done.

The final answer may lie in knowing what your website is going to be. If it's a personal site for your own use to share with friends and family, go for it, and if you're happy with the site, then it's probably just perfect.

If your site, however, is for business, it gets a bit more complicated. Because research shows that you get less than 3 seconds to get the attention of the visitor who finds your online business site before he or she decides whether to stay or leave, it needs to be at its absolute best from the very start. If you are convinced that you can do as good a job as anyone else, by all means take your  best shot. But, remember that it is your online business. Are you willing to take the chance your potential customers will think it's as great as you do?

Best of luck with your decision. We want all online businesses (well, maybe not our direct competition) to succeed. If we can be of any help, please contact us. We are offering up to 2 free hours of consultation for a limited time, and we'll be glad to talk your situation over with you, no matter what you decide to do. Even though we think we can out-design anybody when it comes to websites, we'll answer your questions without any pressure to contract with us.

Just contact us to get started.

Ed Cottrell, Editor and President