“Creating a new website is like having a baby – the first one really is the hardest.”

These words came from one of our current clients, during the early wireframe phase of his first website. And although we make the process as easy as possible for our clients, it remains a valid point. Your website is your company’s public face after all, so you really do want to make sure that each and every detail is just right.

The process can be overwhelming for the uninitiated. If this describes you, read on. What follows is a basic, plain-language checklist for getting your organization online.

Any professional will tell you that design is pointless without context. This is especially true in the design of a company’s website.

Even if you have no interest in design theory and fundamentals, for the sake of your business there is one point that should never be forgotten: the purpose of design is communication.

We receive a Request for Proposal (RFP) in some form or another nearly every day. Some projects are simple, but none offer as much potential for miscommunication as the Web Design RFP. Often, first contact is in the form of the impossibly vague question, “We need a website; how much do you charge?”

It is important to note that web design projects can range from the very basic (e.g., PSD deliverables for under a grand) to the mind-twistingly complex (some website budgets can reach seven digits). If you don’t provide a clear picture of what you need, there’s no way a design company can quote on it.

I’ve long been a proponent of the view that if a technology is to be used, it should be done deliberately, with intelligent restraint, and with purpose. What’s more, it should not be used for reasons such as abstract trendiness or at the expense of general usability. You can have impact without beating your audience over the head.

What follows is a recounting of one man’s frustration at the restaurant industry’s infatuation with Flash. Enjoy.

Companies hire corporate designers to craft solutions that clearly and memorably communicate their brand’s message, directly to their market. They understand that without a full comprehension of consumer psychology and the user experience (UX), they may as well be chucking paint into a corner.

Effective strategic design is somewhat like a composition written for a symphony orchestra, in that it requires several instruments working symbiotically in order to achieve the desired result.

The corporate design field is somewhat unique. It is a field on which nearly every successful business in the Western world depends, yet is simultaneously one about which very few people are actually educated.

The issues are alarming, to say the least.

On the one hand, we have the dime-store design trend chipping away at the integrity of the industry, and the amateurs passing themselves off in the marketplace as legitimate professionals, who happen to think that $100 is a fine price to charge for a thoughtless, conceptually barren logo, assembled from clip-art on stolen software. This is all exacerbated by the actual professionals who succumb to pressures to lower what was a fair market price, in order to compete with contenders whose qualifications, process, and quality of work are not nearly in the same league.

From disparate beginnings, Christmas has become largely a cultural celebration for my generation – one meant to bring people together and place our focus on the people we love.

It has also become an uber-brand that represents intangible, un-buy-able values (peace, love, joy, family, selflessness) simultaneously with supreme commercialism.

“I want our site to be number one on Google”

The number of times a client has uttered those words to us (or a close variation on the theme) is somewhat staggering.

Sure, we all want it. And for certain parameters, we can get it for you. But while Search Engine Optimization is a very important component of both web development and your overall marketing platform, it cannot stand alone.

It has been an insane month. We do try to plan our projects and workload in such a way that things are as balanced as possible, but it’s sometimes unavoidable that fate conspires in such a way that your best laid plans are set to ruin.

Maybe not to “ruin”, so much… being busy is good. It’s fantastic, even. I love what I do, and the fact that so many people come to us on their own or through referrals makes me feel great about my work. But in periods like this, I do come to miss things like human contact, sleep, exercise and healthy food.

That’s one of the reasons I was so surprised this weekend to find a notice telling me that we’d been nominated and chosen to receive a CWA Design Award. Nice!

Our first web host made a lot of promises, as they all do. Looking back, at the time I was pretty overwhelmed at the sheer number of hosting companies available, and besides the price and common-sense things like storage space and bandwidth, I wasn’t all that confident on what differentiated one from another.

It’s been several years now, and we’ve gone through several different hosting companies. Each one was slightly better than the last, but in the end, they all let us down in one way or another. The last host we used let our site and email go down for a whole week, all the while trying to convince me the problem was on my local machine… I’m not an idiot. Needless to say, we dropped them in a hurry.