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Starting Off With Website Design & Development
In the past two articles I’ve introduced the different elements of internet marketing (which as you’ll remember include website design and development, search engine optimisation, pay per click, email marketing, affiliate marketing and online display advertising). I have encouraged you to think about promoting your website in all your offline marketing activity and have started you off in thinking about acceptable costs per customer or booking.
As we move forward through this series of articles, I’ll give some indication of what you could spend on each of the internet marketing elements mentioned and I’ll also try to give examples of when and in what circumstances the elements might be utilised by travel companies.
Having said this there is of course no hard and fast rule for what you should be spending on your internet marketing, nor as to what internet marketing elements should be used. Each case will be different and herein lies the beauty of the internet – within reason you can spend as much or as little as you like and with the right guidance and tools you can make up for a lack of cash by doing a lot of the work yourself.
The importance of your site in internet marketing
People often ask me why I include website design in my list of internet marketing activities.
Aside from the fact that - initially at least - you website will be the biggest investment you’ll make in marketing your business on the internet, your website (and particularly your home page) often gives your potential customers their first (and long lasting) impression of your company.
Before the internet age (and since) travel companies put a lot of time and effort into their printed brochures (and other printed marketing materials) – to ensure that they were appropriate to the business image they were trying to portray and to ensure that the marketing messages they were trying to convey were communicated effectively.
It goes without saying that your website is merely a natural extension of your other marketing activities and should support and reinforce the image and messages you are looking to convey elsewhere.
However, there is another reason for thinking about website design and development as an internet marketing element – how you design and construct your website has a direct bearing on how well you rank in the search engines for natural search.
To rank well in Google and other search engines, you need to make sure that the engine can read your page content, that the content can be updated regularly and easily and that you have control of other elements such as ‘meta-tags’. Clearly there is far more to search engine optimisation than this, and we will cover SEO off in more detail in future articles, but the point to consider at this stage is that if natural search is important to you, then you need to think about this in your web design and not make the mistake of many – building the site then start thinking of SEO.
Should you do it yourself or use a designer?
So you’re ready to move forward with having your first website built or your existing website modified/improved.
If you’ve taken the advice I gave in week one, you’ve spent a bit of time looking at competitor sites and you’ve given thought to the key messages you want to convey in the ‘look and feel’ of your site.
The next stage is to decide how you are going to have the site built.
Clearly you have the option to do it yourself, either via a template based service or by going on a course for a website design package like Dreamweaver.
Templates are often offered by hosting companies as part of their service. A good hosting company will offer you the facility to register domain names, host your website, set up email addresses and enable you to design your site yourself using templates.
Clearly, by definition templates can be limited in how much versatility and flexibility they offer, but if you merely want your site to be a simple corporate brochure then this could be an option.
One thing to watch with template services is that some template services offer to host your site on a ‘sub-domain’ basis, whereas you ideally want your site to have a domain of its own.
If the template/host offers you a domain like this - ‘www.reallyusefulwebsites.hostingcompany.co.uk’ then your site would merely be a sub-domain of the hosting company website. As a result you wouldn’t own the domain name and wouldn’t be able to change hosts without losing all the online credit you build up on the search engines over time and of course all the links to your site that you’ll establish over time would be lost if you moved.
It’s much better to buy a domain name, which is pretty cheap these days and host content against that domain name, whether template based or not.
An alternative to templates, but still doing it yourself, is to get some training on a website design package. There are many such packages, with Dreamweaver one of the market leaders. Courses are available locally and can be found easily by doing a search on Google.
If you want to use a professional website designer/developer, you’ll need to write a brief so that your designer/developer knows what you are trying to achieve.
The brief should include some background information on your company and it should also list your competitors. You might want to detail how you are going to promote the site and your initial thoughts on how it should look and functionality that you’d like to see incorporated.
You also need to think about how content will be updated, for example do you want to do it in-house or pay your designer/developer to do it.
If you want to do it in-house, which is more cost effective in the long term, you will need the designer/developer to build a bespoke content management system or link the front end of the site to an off the shelf CMS. There will be a cost for this, but if you don’t have the facility to update the site yourself you’ll probably end up paying the designer/developer his hourly rate to make simple changes – which will mount up over time.
Finding a designer/developer
Having written your brief the next stage is to find a website designer and/or developer.
You could use a website design/development company, many of whom will come up when submitting a search on Google – e.g. ‘web design london’ – or you could use Yell.com to find them.
Obviously, whilst many of these companies offer a good service, they have overheads to cover and freelance website designers/developers may be more cost effective for you.
If you are going down the freelancer route, you can find them via word of mouth, in local directories or via specialist freelancer websites.
The type of website you are having built will determine whether you only need a designer or need a designer and developer.
Designers generally design the look and feel of the site and produce any images or logos you need, whereas developers programme any functionality you need and integrate the site with back end databases/booking engines etc.
Some designers/developers offer both services though you should check how skilled they are in each element, as programmers don’t always have the eye for good design and designers sometimes don’t have the depth of knowledge needed for sophisticated back-end programming. If you find a good designer who is also a solid programmer hold onto them – they are worth their weight in gold as a one stop solution.
Your website budget
Clearly your budget for your website will be determined by the size of your business and how important your online presence is to your business model.
It is possible to build a site yourself for next to nothing using templates, or for just a few hundred pounds by doing a course and buying a software package like Dreamweaver.
If you use a professional website designer/developer the cost will be determined by the size and complexity of your site and what back-end integration work is necessary.
As a rule of thumb, a freelance designer should be able to deliver a simple static site of a few pages for £500, including logo design, with a slightly more complex site costing between £2k-5k.
Of course, there is no limit to the cost – it all depends on the size and scale of the project.
Having completed your brief, it’s a good idea to get two or three quotes, perhaps asking a mix of freelancers and website design companies to quote for the project.
After completing your brief, finding some designers/developers and getting quotes from them the next stage is to choose a designer/developer and agree a detailed specification for the project.
You are of course paying for the designer/developers expertise, but it pays to work with them and manage them very closely.
We’ll cover off the things to watch for next time.
Tim Harding
www.reallyusefulwebsites.co.uk
Tim Harding wrote this article for Travel Trade Gazzette, the leading travel industry trade publication.
Tim Harding is Managing Director of Really Useful Websites Limited, an internet marketing company. Prior to launching Really Useful Websites Tim was Marketing Director at NCL and Senior Marketing Manager at Airtours Holidays.
