Top 5 Questions Most People Ask About Website Design

We’ve been in this web design business for 12 years now. And we’ve heard lots of strange questions. And we realize most people still don’t get what web design is about.

Here are some commonly asked questions of website design.

How much does a website cost?

I would ask you in return: what do you want the website to do? A car tuned for sports racing costs a damn lot more than a car used for town driving. So your needs determine the costs.

The question is, do you want a Kancil or do you want a BMW? If you want a BMW, a car designed for performance, it is inevitable you pay more.

In our case, each customised website we produce is like a finely tuned performance car. And we dare to guarantee results if you follow our website design methodology (because we are marketers who understand how business is run and what triggers to use to get people to react the way you want them to react on your website).

Let’s be very clear on this. We aren’t your typical web designers. We are marketers.

And what are the results? You can look forward to increased sales which come direct from your website.

Which means increased profits.

Which means in no time, the website essentially pays for itself and starts making pure profit for you.

Only our clients will understand this logic. That’s why we call a website as your best marketing tool and the best investment you can ever make for your business.

If you pay for top performance, you get top performance. If you invest in us and our expertise, your investment in your website will definitely pay off.

Which would you rather spend on – a cheap RM500 website which doesn’t net you a single paying customer OR an expensive website which gets you customers all the time? The choice is yours.

Can you help me SEO my website?

SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is not a plug-in or an add-on once your website is built. SEO is part of the foundation of any well-designed website. It is like the plumbing in your house. You must build in piping and plumbing when you are building the house; it cannot be simply added on as you please once the house is completed.

And SEO is not a quick solution if your website is badly built. If you have a website that’s not working, you first work on the website. This may mean redesigning the entire website, starting from scratch. This is the cost when you hire web designers who think snazzy visuals are all that matters.

Can I have Flash on my website? Because I want my website visitors to be entertained when they arrive at my website.

To this, we say, what is important for your business? To entertain or to know what you have to offer?

For instance, let’s say you are going to open a shop. Do you design the shop so that your customers can walk in and buy from you easily OR do you design the shop as you please because that’s how YOU like it (and disregard your customers)?

Do you have clowns standing outside your shop preventing your customers from walking in?

Because that is what Flash does. It’s a barrier between your shop and your customers.

All they want is to go inside your shop and see what you have for them.

Do you think you are entertaining your customers? More likely they’ll be annoyed because each time they want to get into your front door, the clowns step in and make funny faces. You’ll have to shove the clowns aside if you want to get through that door!

Honestly, how many times have you pressed the SKIP INTRO button when you see Flash loading when you go to other people’s websites? Do you really wait to see what happens when the Flash is all loaded? Chances are, you were annoyed that you had to wait for the page to load.

Flash is all right if you are using it for a multimedia presentation. It is all right if you use it at the right place.

If you need to dazzle your customers with Flash because you have nothing else more substantial to offer them when they get past your Flashy intro, you’re really in deep trouble. If you have no content to attract (and content is really what attracts people to websites) then work on the content. Don’t try to sidestep the issue by focusing on things which don’t matter!

I want to be #1 on Google.

Well, yes but so do a couple of other million websites! Any company that tells you they can put you right on the top might as well put themselves on the top right?. And then again, we could also ask you: rank number one for which keyword? If it is something like “cars” or “business”, forget it. Those are way too generic. People who search are doing it more sophisticatedly now. They go for localized search, they key in different synonyms, they try all sorts of search terms.

It is better to be on the first page of Google/Yahoo/Bing for the keyword you want to rank for. Anyway, there are many ways to get to the first page of Google but if your website is not optimized to convert the traffic (which comes your way), no amount of being on page one will ever help.

Sad to say, many business owners don’t realize this. Say you have a prime shop location in a shopping mall but if your shop’s dingy and dark, with grumpy salespeople, the walk-in traffic (potential customers) who walk into your shop will walk right out again!

The same logic for websites. Clean up your website first before you optimize for traffic!

How soon can my website appear on Google?

Well, it depends on who builds it and how it is built. We can safely say that our websites have ranked pretty well and appear quite fast in Google (sometimes within the month). We’d like to think we are superheroes and chummy with Google but in fact, Google loves it when websites are built lean, built to load well and optimized for indexing.

Did we also mention that manually handcoding the website is one of our core skills? We can bet you NO ONE you know will do so. It is time-consuming but it allows us to design faster and in return, makes a leaner website. Most designers will stick to using Macromedia Dreamweaver. We’re old skool but you know what, old skool when it matters most, still works, the last we checked!