Why don't I buy a software package and I or one of my staff could design our website?
The main answer to this question is that building a good website is actually much more complicated than it would first appear.I've laid out some of the reasons for this below.
APPEARANCE
Because how a website appears is governed by many variable
factors such
as the resolution set up for the monitor being used by the viewer,
WYSIWYG, (what you see is what you get) website software packages have
to limit the way your site will appear.
They do this to prevent you
designing a site which will force viewers using a lower resolution to
scroll sideways to see the whole of your page for instance, and also to
remove the risk of some other unpredictable results that you could
cause.
The program will do this by fixing your page to a set width in a
table or using C.S.S., normally just under 800 pixels wide and centred
on the screen. This means that, except for viewers using 800 X 600
resolution, there will be an empty space on either side of the contents
of your page where nothing will appear. The higher the resolution used
by your visitors, the larger these gaps will be.
One web design package
that I bought and used in my early attempts at web design didn't even
center the fixed element or use a background colour to the page, and
presented
my pages with a large empty white space down the right hand side of the
page. (see pictures on the right).
When I contacted their support team they actually admitted that they
had no idea why this was so.
Whist fitting the main part of the page into a 800 pixel fixed width is one way of dealing with variable browser resolutions it can certainly be achieved in a much more pleasing fashion to the eye than this and there are also other options. As you can see, this site, which I have designed with an html editor and using CSS, spreads right across the screen whatever the resolution you are browsing at, apart for a narrow coloured margin on each side which I have incorporated as a design feature. Designing a site this way does mean however that every page must be checked at various resolutions and in different browsers to make sure that the pages will appear as you would want them to to.
One consequence of designing a site with a WYSIWIG editor, especially if you make extensive and frequent changes to your design can be a complete dog's dinner of the underlying code with partially deleted fragments of code litterring the page. Another problem that can occur is a massive CSS stylesheet in the 'head' section of your page which can cause all sorts of unwanted problems. The correct place for the CSS code is in its own exported CSS file.
My 10 years of experience of building websites and working knowledge of html & C.S.S. have taught me how to achieve this as well as how to overcome some of the many other limitations of web design applications.
TIME & COST OF DOING IT YOURSELF
What is considered by most webmasters to be one of the best website building software packages costs around £350.00. There are cheaper website building products around but there are also reasons why they are cheaper, I have tried some of them in the past and found out for myself the hard way what their limitations are. You will need to add to the price of the software the cost of time spent by you or your staff in learning to use the software and designing the site. More time has to be spent writing your copy, processing images for presentation on the web, finding a reliable hosting service, finding the best company to register your domain name and configuring their control panel to point at your website. Also there's checking your site for errors & compatiblity, and learning how to use a FTP program to upload your files. If you have a site with more than a few pages, it is also advisable to create an XML sitemap for submission to the search engines and to write a robots.txt file for your site. Then there are the settings in your hosting control panel to configure, such as disabling hot linking to images to prevent your bandwidth being stolen. You will have to decide which is the right size of text to use and what resolution to optimise your site for. If you look at the various options I offer you will see that I can get you up and running with your first web presence for less than the cost of buying a good website building software package.
DESIGN
As with all other forms of design, websites can be well designed or badly designed.