DesignSpeak

What is HTML?

You may have heard of HTML, or it may mean absolutely nothing to you - either way it doesn’t matter; all you need to know is that it is what makes the web work.

Just as we use language to communicate in our daily lives, web sites use HTML (HyperText Markup Language) to translate our website’s content into something that can be understood by the web browser that we use.

It is used by web designers to take the layout of the pages and turn it into a language that can be displayed by a web browser and seen by the world.

At it’s simplest, it is used to tell the browser what is a heading, and what is a paragraph, as in the example shown below:

<h1>Welcome to our website!</h1>
<p>Our products are well-made and very good value, so buy them now!</p>

This way, it is used by search engines, such as Google and Yahoo, to index the page properly - making sure that the headings are shown in the search results, and a description of the page content.

Selling online

Getting a web shop up and running isn’t as tricky as it looks at first glance.

There are a number of ways to get started, from simple PayPal buttons (more of those later), through to a fully featured shop that allows you to track your customers’ buying habits, suggest other products a customer might like, and send marketing emails with your latest offers.

The first place to start is to ask yourself the following questions, and answer them truthfully:

Do I really need to sell my stuff online?

It may sound like a daft question in this day and age, but do you really need to open up a web shop? If you are already selling your goods directly to the public, have you noticed a gap in the market for you to sell them online, or is it just because you think you should have a web shop?

Are the things I want to sell online suitable?

If you are selling perishable goods such as food, then you need to consider whether shipping them via courier or post is going to be cost-effective, or even possible. If they are large, bulky or heavy items, can you send them via regular post, or will they need a special service?

Will I run the shop myself?

A web shop is not usually something that you can just set up and forget about. Often, your customers will decide at 10pm on a Friday night that they simply must ask you immediately whether you can ship on a Saturday - are you available then to field calls or emails? If you don’t want to, then you must make your business hours clear.

There’s nothing worse than sending an email Friday and getting a reply on Monday - you wouldn’t put up with that if you left a message on someone’s answerphone. The web is 24/7, and people expect a real person to be available most days. 

How will I send them out?

There are many courier services other than the big guns of TNT and Parcel Force that will pick up from you and deliver UK-wide for around £15 for up to 20kg. This is much cheaper than using the Royal Mail, but it does mean you have to wait in for the pickups.
For smaller items up to about 2kg, If you think you will be shipping high volumes, then talk to TNT about their rates for multiple packages - opening an account gives huge savings on the one-off package price.

What will it cost to setup?

It will mainly depend on how many products you have, but you should budget from around £1500 to £3000 for a web shop, including the software, design and setup.

Choosing a web hosting company

Choosing a host for your website is an important decision. There are many web hosting companies around, all of whom make claims to be the cheapest at their level, but few offer really reliable hosting with the ease of use that you need. A few things you should consider when evaluating the various hosts are:

• Do you want to be responsible for contacting the hosting company when your site goes down? 
  It might seem tempting to get a hosting package for £2.99 per month, but if it’s up to you to set it all up and maintain the website, and you aren’t 100% comfortable with the technology and how it all works, perhaps you would rather someone else handled it and you simply paid them each month.
   
• What server platform and other requirements will your site need?
  If you haven’t had your site built yet, DON’T buy a web hosting package yet! Your web developers will tell you what is required to run the website you ask them to build for you - listen to them! If they suggest something, check it out, but let their experience guide you as much as possible, as you can then go back to them in the future if any problems develop.
   
• Do you have a domain name already?
  A good idea is to register the domain name with one company (such as 123-reg), but then host the website with another company. This basically covers you in case the hosting company disappears - you can then simply point your domain name to another host. If they were controlling the domain too, you might not be able to get hold of them to change what you need to.

Remember your web company can do everything for you, including editing the domain records to point to your webspace, but remember - always make sure any domain name that they register on your behalf has you as the registrant (owner).

What is a web host?

A web host is a business that has banks of large capacity computers (servers), that hold all the pages and graphics that will make up your website when it has been designed and built.

When someone types in your domain name into a web browser, a central database (kind of like a yellow pages for websites) looks up where that website is hosted through a series of numbers called an IP address (like a phone number), and points the request to them. When the request comes in to the web host, they send that request to your particular webspace and the website is served to that user.

What is a CMS?

A Content Management System, or CMS, is a software-based system that allows you to update your website, usually from any internet-enabled computer. It manages the resources (images, video and text), and allows users to create and edit pages, and either publish them directly, or to send them to other users for approval.

There are a huge number of CMSs on the market - in our opinion some of the best are those that are available free (called open-source). Names to look out for are Drupal, WordPress, Text Pattern, Joomla and Moveable Type.

Your web design company will probably have their favourite, and each application has their own strengths and weaknesses, but the best bet is to trust their judgement on which to use.

However, if you have a particular feature in mind that the CMS simply must have, then make sure you let them know at the start - swtiching the CMS later on is likely to be costly!

Is design expensive?

This is a case of ‘how long is a piece of string’. Not helpful I know, but there it is. On a job by job basis, a designer can spend as little or as much time as you can afford on a project.

Now, in order to manage this, you as a client must first determine your budget. It may be helpful to get a few quotes from design studios to help you do this, but be sure that each studio is quoting on exactly the same brief, otherwise you’ll be comparing apples with oranges.

Typically, a good design studio will be charging anywhere from fifty pounds per hour upwards. The studio will give an estimate or a fixed cost, based on the time needed to do a job in their experience, so it is important too that you give them as much detail as possible as the start, so there will be no nasty surprises later on.

As with everything, cost is relative. For example: a studio charging £70 per hour could spend 8 hours creating you a marketing leaflet, charging you £560; the cost of printing may only be £100 for a few thousand (depending on spec of course). Now compare this with the costs for a large, multi-paged brochure: the design cost may well run into the thousands, but the print cost could be ten or twenty thousand pounds. It’s worth paying for expertise, as the stakes are high and a badly prepared job could be very costly when it prints badly.

Beware of printers, or some studios, that will offer to design (or artwork!) free. Those who do either do not value design as a tool for developing your business, or are more concerned with making money out of you by printing your job. Print costs do not depend on the quality of design, so be cautious of this approach.

The rule of thumb is to pay as much as you can afford for design from a reputable studio that can offer experience of the kind of thing that you need. Don’t go for the cheap option unless you are prepared to pick up the pieces yourself if things go wrong. Remember that an experienced designer will be able to do a lot more in an hour than you might imagine!

How do I get something commercially printed?

There are two ways you can do this. Either go to a printer direct, or have your design company to do it for you.

Either way, you’ll need someone to create artwork that is ready-to-print. This is not the same as having a job designed. Once you are happy with design visuals supplied by your designer, you will need to have artwork made that the commercial printer can deal with. Considerations including colour, scope (number of pages), size and shape can all affect the cost and final quality of a print job.

If in doubt, ask the printer for a spec sheet – this will tell you everything you need to know about what the printer expects to receive from you in the way of artwork. Design companies, on the whole, are used to seeing this kind of information, and can tailor a design job to get the best from your budget and print method.

Sometimes a commercial printer will offer to do the creative work for you. This may be in-house, or they may have links with one or more design studios. Be careful to choose the right designer for the job.

Commercial printers invest huge amounts in presses and other machinery (printing press costs commonly run into the millions of pounds), so to make money, they have to print stuff. It’s common sense really, but stop to think about it, it doesn’t matter WHAT they are printing, so long as the press is running they make money – this should ring alarm bells if what you actually want is great design.

Rule of thumb: if you want bread, go to a baker, if you want print, go to a printer, if you want design, go to… er, you get the message.

How do I choose a commercial printer?

Here’s a scenario: Acme Widget Makers have employed a design studio and now own a nice shiny CD that contains all the print-ready-artwork for their new product brochure ready to give to a commercial printer. They walk into the local high street ‘Speedy-Print’ and hand it over. A week later they collect their new brochures, smile happily, and pay the bill.

Where’s the problem?

Well, it’s probably the bill. Let’s start at the beginning…

There are a couple of kinds of commercial printers for doing jobs on paper and board. They’re usually known as ‘jobbing’ or ‘colour’ printers. Now to confuse things, both do colour jobs, but one will generally produce larger scale FULL colour (in essence, that’s photographic reproduction), whilst the other will do smaller work with maybe one or two colours in a job.

The point is this: if you take your job to the wrong one, they’ll most likely sub it out and probably charge you more than if you’d gone direct to the other one in the first place.

You can avoid this risk by asking to see examples of work from the printer before you get a quote. That way you’ll see what they do best, and can judge easily whether it fits your requirement.

Alternatively, you could ask your design firm to handle it all. Yes, they will charge for the additional service (usually by way of a mark up on the print price), but for that charge you will get assurance that the job will arrive with you efficiently and at top spec (and if not, well the designer is at fault and will bear the cost of a reprint – so you’re actually paying for a little ‘insurance’ too).

So, back to Acme Widgets, armed with a little knowledge, they instead take their brochure to ‘Big ‘n’ Shiny Colourprint’ on the out of town trading estate, and get a better price… but don’t forget that designer studios often get trade prices from printers – ask them to quote too.