It’s exciting isn’t it?….You’ve decided you want a personal web site to display your art. You want to rush in and get started. All you need to do is hire a web designer and……STOP! Slow down there….take deep breaths.
Before rushing in head first into a web design project, there are a few alarm bells that I want to help you identify if they go off during the initial business of working with a web designer to create your art web site.
Now I know it can often be difficult not to take everything that a web designer tells you as gospel with regards to what your web site needs. After all they are the ‘professional’ doing this job day in, day out and you possibly have no experience of the ins and outs of web design. And, what’s more, they keep on using complicated techie words that you don’t have a clue about….!
However, the 5 points below should help you navigate the web design minefield and come out on the other side with a web site close to what you were looking for in the first place :-
- “What you want is a Flash Web Site”….(NOT!)
Flash Web sites are created using Adobe Flash software and are mostly very sleek and modern, often with dynamic moving images and stuff zooming in and out of the page. Now Flash is great to add to a web site to give it some life and visual excitement, but if your web designer is trying to persuade you that a total Flash site is the way to go, it’s time to look for a new designer. Why? Well they don’t work like standard HTML sites because there is very little behind the scenes code and information for the search engines to make sense of your site.
Flash web sites may be cool but they are the real world equivalent of putting a ’Mime’ performance outside a supermarket to let passers by know how to find the bread aisle and what offers are on today ! (mime reference from Jared Spool of User Interface Engineering at Macromedia).
Web designers often love them because the end web site can look very slick….and this adds to their extremely cool portfolio, but, if you want people to find your site via search engines, you’ve got to give those search engines some meat. Flash sites don’t have enough meat for the search engines to make any sense of, so your site can be left in the wilderness, unloved and misunderstood….(sniff).
- “We’ll Just Bill You At The End…”
Always Agree a Price in Writing Beforehand….Don’t wait until you get given the final bill to get heart failure!
Web design can eat up many hours for a web designer so it is important for both of you to agree a price in writing before going ahead, then you know where you both stand. If the web designer is uncomfortable with this then again, it may be worth looking elsewhere.
And if you can’t imagine the need to have it in writing, just work out how the heck you are going to prove the agreement if you are taken to court for non-payment of invoices….believe me it does happen and it’s no fun !
- “Search Engine Optimisation is Extra”
A web designer should be very clued up on what needs to be done to your site to make it optimised for search engines and understand that a web site is pretty much useless unless search engine optimised. This will involve doing keyword research to see what words are being used by your competition, and then using these words in the content, code and file names of your web pages.
Your target keywords should feature in the HTML code in:
- titles for each web page on your site (different titles for each)
- description of the page
- Image title + description + Alt tag.
The first two are very important as both the title and the description are displayed in the search engine results and can determine whether the page is a) found by searchers looking for what you offer, and b) clicked on by the searcher because the title and description are relevant enough to provoke them to click onto your site.
On the front (or visual part) of the web pages, the following also needs to incorporate your target keywords:
- The Headings on the web pages
- The text / content of your pages
This should be an integral part of the design cost. If it’s not then you need to know the extra costs involved as you will need to take these costs into account to get the overall price for creating a workable web site.
- “We’ll create Pop-ups of your Art Work”
Pop-ups are where small thumbnails of your images can be clicked on, then up pops another window with the larger version of the image plus details. Javascript is used in the HTML code, and like Flash, it limits the ability of search engines to make sense of the website. This is because the search engines can’t follow through Javascript links, so anything on those pop-up pages can be ignored as far as search engines are concerned.
There are work arounds that a designer can use i.e. creating a site map page from which search engines can find all the pages on your site. Another way is to put normal HTML links on the same pages as the Javascript links so the search engines can follow through those links and find all your pages.
- “We’ll Do X Number Pages For Free”
Well I don’t know about you but whenever a ‘professional’ offers me something for free I think ‘where’s the catch?’….and there always is a catch, do you not think? This can be in the form of an expensive year contract with them, or a poorly designed generic site, or simply a hook to get you signed up with them and you will pay later for your ‘free pages’ billed under another name.
Hope the above ‘Alarm Bells’ help you avoid some of the pitfalls, so that you end up with a site that you are both proud of and that brings new awareness and sales of your art.
Let me know below some of your experiences of creating a website for your art.
