Building professional websites since 1997

All About Websites, & Website Development and Design

The Price of Website Development and Design.

When looking for a website designer, if price is your first and foremost consideration, might I suggest either using Google's free website development option or typing in "cheap website designer" into any major search engine. There are a million-million shingles out there banging away in the Internet breezes, and they are just begging for you to bite. I don't recommend that course, but if you desperately need a website for like $30 or so, then there are template driven designers and 2nd and 3rd world country coders out there who will do it for you. The thing to remember is "buyer beware."

So what exactly is a website?

A website is a four-dimensional interactive experience.

Like 4-D space, everything inside is also outside, and vice versa. Any given page must lead, ultimately, to all other pages with the caveat that it can or should own the capacity to expand exponentially to infinite size and level of detail as desired and needed without having to redesign the entire project. That's a big order, and it's the website designer's job to make it a reality.

A website has a goal, a hierarchy, a plan, a purpose, and a presentation. Those goals, plans, and purpose is up to you. The functional presentation is the website designer's job. You and the website designer work together to develop the hierarchy.

Do-It-Yourself Content Management

Can a website be designed in such a way that it is "easy for you to add content and maintain your website yourself" without knowing much of anything at all?

Well, yes, of course it's possible, with some big, hairy qualifications:

If you know how to, let's say, set up your own email accounts on your computer (not with a program or by inserting a disk your ISP gives you, but all by yourself, including getting down into the ACCOUNT OPTIONS area), and you know how to right click/control click, chances are that it's possible...depending on what you want to do.

And you will have to be willing to learn at least a bit of the language and/or a lot of the software interface, probably both. What kind of web site you want will determine the learning curve — gentle, moderate, or steep.

Forum websites are pretty easy to use (add content, manage the basic administrative jobs). Exceptions to "easy" are forums using VBulletin like JSGuitarForum.com. Blogs are pretty easy, too, and, even if you're pretty new to using a computer, a few lessons will get you rolling. Portals or CMS (content management systems) like Drupal and Joomla require a great deal of effort to learn, and that's once the initial build is completed by a savvy webmaster. Those are the facts.

FYI: There is a choice between dynamically delivered versus XHTML/CSS websites. If you want to constantly rearrange and change content, then you'll either need a dynamically delivered website that runs off of a database, or you'll need to pay a webmaster to upkeep it. Dynamically delivered sites don't ever rank as well as XHTML/CSS websites, which are, in fact, some of the most search engine friendly sites on the Internet if well-designed and optimized for proper ranking.

Now let's talk about size added to Do-It-Yourself maintenance.

The bigger the web site, the more labor intensive it's going to be...for both you (the content provider) and for the website developer. The bigger and more extensive it is, the more expensive it is going to be to design, build, and maintain. And all websites have to be maintained—their code upgraded, patched, or brushed up...by a webmaster, not you—usually at least once a year if not once a month or more.

Again, it depends on what kind of website you want or have. Anything driven by PHP and MySQL is going to require constant monitoring because its code is vulnerable to security breaches, and PHP-driven web sites are now the majority (blogs, shopping carts, forums).

By the way, if you use Dreamhost, a hosting service I use and recommend, then you can DIY your own upgrades and patches if you use their one-click installs. You will, however, still have to learn the software administrative interface and some of the language.

VoIP Service

Websites I can't help you with include services like VoIP. VoIP (Voice-Over-Internet-Protocol), commonly known as "voice chat" require a persistent cron job and utilize huge amounts of server resources to transmit sound and, sometimes, video, live over the Internet. It is essentially a telephone service. Of course, it's wonderful in that it opens huge possibilities for activities like live jamming between musicians who live farther than near. In the future, it will probably be commonplace, but, for right now, it's a service I can't provide you. However, there are solutions for VoIP. Reliable and outstanding phone service is out there, and can be found with a voip service.