What does a Web Designer do?South Florida Technology and Web Design for the Small Office / Home Office professional

The job of a web designer can be tricky, as he/she must utilize all of their knowledge about graphic design, the web, web design and even programming in order to provide your business with one website that will give the users of the internet the best possible information about your business.  You, as the business owner, know your business better than anyone else, including the designer, therefore your main responsibility is to ensure that your designer knows what your business is about, who your customers are (or who you want them to be) and exactly what you are hoping to get out of your new website. 

Aside from actually designing your website, the next most important job for the web designer is learning about your business and understanding your goals for your website and to integrate all of these aspects into your website, and price the site at a fair price.  Once the initial information is gathered and the designer understands your goals and your business and a price has been agreed upon, the designing process can finally begin. 

What do I need to get my site on the web?

A web designer’s primary job is to design and develop your actual website.  This website will be a combination of HTML and CSS files, images and other content (including pdfs or other documents).  Other from having a web designer to do this, you need a place to actually store all of this information, called a host, which is a company that stores and presents customer’s websites by using numerous fast computers. Along with a host, you need a domain name so that internet users can easily find your website.  A domain name is a .com, .net., .org, etc address that internet users can type into their web address bar to access the content of your website.  At Blue Hand Web Design of Florida, we can help you set up all of these additional aspects of the web design and development process if you do not already have these aspects in place. 

The beginning web design process

We work with you to create a design that you and/or your company will be proud to say is their design.  All of our designs are unique to the individual client and are fully customizable.  The first step of the design process is in the first consultation call.  During this call or meeting you will describe to the web design team at Blue Hand Web Design an idea of what you want your website to look like, including colors and potentially other sites you have looked on the web that you like. 

All of this will be taken into consideration when an initial design is created for you.  For this design to be created, it is requested that you send over your company logo and slogan, along with a few images that you would like to include on your site.  You will have an initial design within a week of consultation, providing we have the necessary materials from you.  Content is not necessary at this point, as placeholders can be utilized.  Image placeholders will be used as well if images are not provided at this point. 

Once we send you the design, it is up to you to notify us of any modifications you would like made.  An open line of communication is important in this web design process, and Blue Hand Web Design will be sure to make this process as simple as possible. 

Website development process

After the design is created, the development process begins. This is the part of the process where all the inside pages are created and linked appropriately to each other and the home page.  Content is either provided from the client or is written by the web designer as an additional service, and approved by the client. 

Once all of the content is input into the pages and the site is created, it is up to the client to approve the site and notify the designer of any additional changes desired before the web designer publishes the site to the web.

So the website is complete, now what?

When the site is fully developed, one of the final steps is to upload the website and all of the files included onto the hosting server.  To do this, the designer will need to send all of these files to the server using FTP.  In order for the designer to do this, he/she will need the FTP hostname, username and password (all of this information can be obtained from the hosting provider).  Once the designer has this information, they will upload your site, and when you go to your domain name on the web, your site should appear live. 

Though this is the “final” step, there is still the task of marketing your website to prospective clients.  Blue Hand Web Design of Florida can assist you in this through our specialized Search Engine Optimization campaigns and our multimedia marketing campaigns, using such clients as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn.  Contact us today to get started building your web presence!