Some Frequently Asked Questions, compiled to help you understand my process…

What is the process?
How long will it take?
Do you host the site?
Do you use Flash or other animations?
E-commerce
Can I update my own site?
What size are the sites designed for?
What format should my images and files be in?
How do we protect my images against copyright violations?
How does my site get seen by search engines?
Do you redesign existing sites?

What process is involved to create a website?
First I’ll ask the customer to send me as detailed a list as possible as to what they want in a site – number of pages, types of pages (homepage, bio, gallery pages with 5 categories, links page, etc.), approximate number of images they want to display on each page, any PayPal information to be included, etc. Additional information such as the type of look and feel they desire (and what they don’t want!) should be mentioned as well, including whether they have an existing logo they want to incorporate into the site. Then I can provide them with a free cost estimate via email.

If they approve, I will snail mail them my contract, in which I ask for a 50% deposit.

The customer will return a copy of the signed contract to me with their deposit, and will either send me a CD of their files, or if agreed-upon ahead of time, they can be sent via email. This usually works if they don’t have that many images; otherwise sending via a CD is best.

Then the fun begins! I review their files and contract in order to get an even better feel for what style they want the site to have. We can also discuss this on the phone, although many people have been comfortable listing their likes and dislikes in an email.

I then begin work on a homepage/site design* that is unique to that person and will not look “templatized.” Why just the homepage? The style that you’ll see on that page will be carried over onto all pages of the site, so if the customer approves that page, they’ll have a good idea of what the rest of the site will look like… and I won’t spend time mocking up all the other pages. Designs can be modified – I frequently adjust pages to suit the customer’s wishes, such as font changes, and even slight layout changes. If the customer doesn’t like any of the first 3 designs I submit to them, there will be an additional hourly fee incurred to mock up new designs, but any of the designs can be revised as stated above, and this is frequently what happens. It’s very much a back-and-forth, joint process. The end result is usually a combination of my initial design and the customer’s tweaks.

*I email the designs to the customer as compressed jpgs, never over 200 KB, so even folks on slow connections can view them.

How long will it take?
Typically my websites take 4-8 weeks to complete. The variables are whether the customer is able to supply me with all or most of the files upfront, the customer’s schedule and availability to answer questions and review initial designs (this can take some back-and-forth over the course of a few weeks), and the amount of revisions requested at each stage.

Do you host the site?
I don’t offer website hosting services, but can definitely help the customer choose a host and help them with the domain name registration process if they’d like. I use LunarPages for my own site and have referred them to many customers. Their customer service is excellent as well as their rates (currently $6.95/month for the basic hosting package, as well as free domain name registration). If a customer chooses to sign up with them, and of course there is no pressure to do so, I will credit them one free hour of my time.

Do you use Flash and/or other animations?
While Flash does have its benefits and can certainly make a website look wonderful, I’ve chosen not to include it in any of the sites I design. Primarily because the incorporation of Flash on a site means your viewer will have to always have the most recent Flash plug-in in order to be able to view it properly, and you don’t want to lose viewers because they can’t even get past the homepage. A customer once pointed me to 3 websites he really admired so that I could see what type of look he wanted his own site to have. I try to keep all of the current and various plug-ins, yet I couldn’t open any of those sites without first upgrading each one. Needless to say, your casual viewer won’t bother and you’ll lose them right off the bat. And if they’re on a slow connection, the page might be painfully slow for them to view.

E-commerce
I can easily add PayPal to your website, but for various reasons have chosen not to work with any other types of e-commerce and other shopping carts. I also prefer working with small e-commerce sites that don’t require very frequent updates (i.e., quarterly updates are great; weekly is not something I want to handle).

PayPal makes everything easy by allowing the vendor to use the PayPal shopping cart without any additional programming, and including the “Buy now” buttons is a cinch. It also makes the buyer comfortable because only PayPal has their credit card info, not the website owner.

However, my sites are structured in such a simple way using tables and CSS that a customer could take my site design to someone else and have him or her add their preferred shopping cart with no problems.

Can I update my own site?
I write my code using very basic and simple HTML in table format, using some CSS (cascading stylesheets). No javascript or fancy Flash animations. If a customer is somewhat computer savvy, or perhaps has a computer savvy spouse, significant other, child or friend to help them, they could do their own updates either using software of their choice like Dreamweaver, or by scratch in a text editor. Most of my customers have been people who don’t want to go anywhere near attempting that sort of thing, though! However, I do caution people that if they choose to do their own updates, I may not be able to easily troubleshoot any problems from afar, short of restoring the site to its previous version if things get messed up.

There are products available called “content management systems” that some web designers offer that allow people to easily update their own sites. I currently do not offer full support for these (it helps me keeps my rates lower), but there is one by Macromedia called “Contribute” that might be an option for those who really want to do their own updates.

Not that I’m trying to discourage anyone from doing their own updates – I’m just letting you know that while in theory it’s certainly doable and easy if you can handle that sort of thing, it all depends on your courage and skill level, as well as the product being used. I charge $30/hour for updates, and can squeeze a lot into an hour. I can usually add 5-6 new pieces of artwork (on the main gallery page with thumbnails, as well as creating their respective individual pages with associated text), as well as make a few text changes here and there, in the course of an hour.

What determines the overall size of the "page" on the screen?
I still design for the 800x600 resolution for a couple of reasons. There are still some people running in 800x600. Last I checked online, one site said that 17% of the people in their survey are still in 800x600, with no one at 640x480 (thank goodness!), 58% at 1024x768 and only 19% at a higher resolution.

Sticking to 800x600 also hopefully helps fit at least the homepage on the screen without scrolling, even when a user is running 1024x768, because depending on their browser, and the number of menubars and toolbars they have open in the browser, the actual screen real estate might even be less than 600 pixels high. But of course, if your pages require a height higher than 600 pixels, by all means they will scroll vertically. I just don’t setup anything wider than 800 pixels, and try to keep the homepage shorter than 600 in height. 800x600 also will avoid any nasty horizontal scrolling that is a usability nightmare.

You can set up a website to adjust to the viewer’s resolution. That is, rather than specifying size in fixed pixel dimensions, you can use percentages, but then you can never, ever guarantee that what your viewer is seeing is what you’d like them to see, layout size. Things wrap differently as they view it at different resolutions that way, so I liked the fixed dimensions.

What format should my images and files be in?
I can work from any type of digital images. Most likely you will have .tiff or .jpg files. There’s an additional fee to scan 35mm prints or hardcopy. I am not equipped to scan slides.

Your digital images should be as large as possible. I will crop them (if required), as well as resize and sharpen them to create the thumbnail and large versions. You can always reduce in size but enlarging isn’t desirable, so send me your largest and best images. I can also retouch images including removing backgrounds, lightening them, etc., but extensive retouching will incur an additional charge.

It’s much easier for me to work from existing electronic text files as well, than to retype from hardcopy. Text can be sent to me via email or on your CD, in many formats including Microsoft Word, text, .rtf, etc., or just pasted into the body of an email message.

How do we protect against copyright violations of my images (other than by warnings)?
That’s a good question, and one that comes up often for artists in all mediums. Overall, there is not much you can do to prevent someone from right-clicking on the graphic and doing a “save as” and saving the image to their hard drive. There is code I can insert with each image to prevent that, but an easy way around it for a savvy viewer is to just hit the Print-Screen key and the entire page is now in the clipboard for them to “steal.” So I no longer include that code.

If you’re a quilt pattern designer, for example, even a small image, once seen online, could be redrawn (not even necessarily traced). In other words, by displaying your artwork online (or even in a printed brochure), it’s out there for the world to see. There are a few small things we can do, though.

I do include copyright warnings on the homepage, and if you’d like, on all other pages.

I also resize and compress all jpgs so that the highest resolution image is *not* on the server. That is, you may have a thumbnail page, in which those images are about 200 pixels at the widest or tallest, and if someone printed them on a 300dpi printer, they’d be less than an inch big. If those thumbnails are clickable and open to larger images, we can keep those sizes on the small side as well – nothing wider or taller than 600 pixels, for example. You may occasionally see websites with very, very slow-loading graphics. If you happen to right-click on them and save them to your hard drive, you might see that the HTML code is telling them to display at a size like 600 x 400, the real image on the server is the massive, high-quality original, at 2048 x 1536 or even larger. We will not do that! Not only for speed reasons, but so that the best resolution that exists for good printouts is not out there for people to snag. That’s about the best one can do.

You could also watermark each image, but that can be distracting and annoying to viewers. I don’t know of many people who like this or actually incorporate it in their sites.

How does my site get “seen” by search engines?
I provide several services for this. I still include meta tags (keywords and description) in the code of every page for those search engines who still use them. I also make sure that each page has relevant content for the search engines who can “read live text,” so we put appropriate titles and body text on each page, especially the higher level pages. A page consisting entirely of graphics or a Flash animation can’t be read, for example, so I make sure to include a blurb of live text on the homepage (which is typically graphics-intensive) that describes your site. I will also submit your site to a few of the top search engines such as Google, Yahoo and MSN when done.

I have a site that I’m not really happy with. Can you work with those files and redesign it?
Yes! I may not be able to use the existing code because I prefer to setup the files using my own formats to make future updates easier, but depending on your situation and current site, I may be able to redesign it for a slightly lower cost than if I were to create a site for you from scratch.