Getting Started

You may be wondering about how to get started with your webpage. We at Inventive Web Design are here to help you find your way through the process. Here are a few tips that may help you:

1. Purpose - What is the purpose of your website?

To gain a favorable impression of the company or organization.
To help people find the location of your business.
To sell products directly taking credit card information over the Internet
To encourage potential customers to contact us by phone or mail to consummate a sale.
To make available product information and price lists to distributors or customers.
To strengthen brand identification.
To develop a qualified list of prospects

3. Favorite Websites

Take a look at some websites that are already out there. Look at your competitors sites and well as ones you enjoy. Bookmark them or make a list of them so we can see what kind of design you may be interested in.

2. Site Organization - How many and what types of pages do you want?

Here are a few to take into consideration:

Home Page, About Us, Products/Services, FAQs (Frequently Asked Quetions), Contact, Locatation, Etc.

3. Site and Domain Names

What will be the Title of your site and the Domain Name (www.yoursite.com). You may check the availability of your domain name at GoDaddy.com (http://www.godaddy.com)

4. Web Hosting Service

We are not in the web hosting business. We recommend to our clients web hosting services tailored to their specific needs. We usually do not recommend hosting on your local dial-up ISP, since they too often are not well-prepared to meet specialized business site hosting needs. Their main business is usually dial-up access, and hosting is only a sideline for them. Please let us recommend a Web host service for you. We require cgi-bin access and FTP access.

5. Graphics & Multimedia

What do you want at the top of your page or on each page? Do you want to incorportate images, video or music?

6. Color and Accents

What kind of colors would you like to use?

7. Basic Page Elements

These are the important items which appear on nearly every webpage on your site (except the "home" page).

Page titles which show at top of Web browser only
Top-of-page graphic based on the design of the masthead graphic
Page Title in larger type.
Text.
Navigation Bar
Standard company ID near bottom of page
E-mail response link
Copyright and trademark information in small print at the bottom of every page. What registered trademarks, trademarks, and service marks does your company want to indicate here?

8. Registering and Advertising Your Website

Consider:

Advertising your Website to Web search engines that index the Web
Giving customers a good reason to come by offering them something
Finding industry-wide linking pages and negotiating reciprocal links to and from their web pages.
Purchasing Web advertising
Becoming active in several of the thousands of Internet news groups and mailing lists
Developing a "signature" mini-ad attached to all your e-mail messages
Setting up a page for your company on Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, etc.
Including your e-mail and Web addresses on all your company's print literature, stationery, and display advertising
E-mail newsletters

Information about number of visitors to your website can usually be obtained from your Internet Service Provider or Google Analytics.
We submit your information to Web search engines to "register" your website after final payment is received. Before doing this we work with you to get 5 to 10 keywords and a carefully constructed 25-word sentence contain the most important keywords.