We hear this — or something like it — a lot:

“I don’t need bells and whistles. I just want a basic website/logo/business card/brochure/etc.”

Many people think of design as “the fancy stuff” that you can leave out of the transaction, kind of like the undercoating when you’re buying a car. Sure, the salesperson says it’s great, but do you really need it?

Yes. And we’re not just saying it because we employ designers, though that’s true, too. The answer lies in understanding design.

What design is

Design is an integral part of producing most things, especially those you find in the marketing/media world — websites, brochures, logos, and so on. Good design is essentially problem-solving. How do I get product/service/message A to audience B?

In the same way that an entrepreneur writes a business plan by figuring out what the market wants and how to deliver it, designers help you figure out how best to reach your target audiences.

Design is an educated series of choices with one goal in mind. The difference between a “designed” logo and a “non-designed” one is huge. The former is based on solid principles — what people respond to visually — and the latter is basically a shot in the dark.

You might think a drawing of a dog is a drawing of a dog, but myriad factors can influence the viewer:

• line weight — heavy or thin
• color — warm or cool
• posture — facing the viewer or turned away
• style — cartoony, vintage look, traditional, edgy

And the list goes on. When you add type to the illustration, there’s another layer of meaning that design can define:

• serif vs. sans serif
• font style — traditional, decorative, etc.
• weight — solidity vs. lightness
• letterspacing — open vs. closed

With a single drawing and a few words, you’ve already said a lot about your company. Design can help you ensure your brand says what you want it to say. Without it, the message you send to your potential customers can be counterproductive.

What design isn’t

Design isn’t a cure-all. If your company name is Bland Interiors, you have a higher hill to climb than your competitors. No matter how fine a family name “Bland” is (I had some lovely Blands as neighbors in junior high), it’s more than design can do to change a word’s meaning.

Design isn’t a substitute for solid market research. Design reinforces the research and planning you’ve done. If you don’t have a clear idea of who you’re trying to reach and with what message, you don’t have anything real to hang your design on.

We can drop back and punt with some degree of security. The principles of good design can always be put to work, even when some details are unknown. But if you don’t have a clue about your customers, design can’t bridge that knowledge gap.

Design isn’t a button on the computer. If our experience were a kid, it would be in college by now. No matter how wonderful the latest software is, if it’s not put to use with a sense of good design, it won’t help you. We deliver design based on years of real-world experience. That’s more valuable than all the talking paper clips in China.

It’s only words…

But words can drive your website visitors away, to paraphrase The Bee Gees.

Most visitors will only read a small number of words on a computer screen, compared to the number of words they might read in a magazine or newspaper.

You are qualified

The good news is that you are highly qualified to write about your business — you know it better than anyone else. Your website visitors don’t want to read fluffy market-speak. Just think about the most straightforward words and phrases that you would use to describe your business to a person you met in the street.

Five easy questions

The old standard “who, what, where, when, why” questions are a great place to start:

• who are you/who is your business?
• what can you do for someone?
• where are you/what area do you serve?
• when was your company started, or how much experience do you have?
• why is your product/service great/unique/desirable?

Three top tips

Nothing fancy is required. Plain speaking, short sentences, and bullet points are your best writing tools. In other words, use:

• plain speaking,
• short sentences, and
• bullet points.

Scanning, not reading

Keep things short and sweet. The average website user scans a page rather than reading it word-by-word. Recent user studies emphasize how little actual reading takes place on a web page, so avoid large, unbroken blocks of text.

Stories — know when to hold ’em

A final, important consideration is the needs of your users. What do they want to find out, and how?

Some users want information as quickly as possible. As nice as it is to hear the heartwarming story of how you inherited an old family shovel, which led you to a lifelong passion for gardening, so you opened your own landscaping business after years in college, consider that some users are just looking for the facts about what you can do for them:

• is your business capable?
• how much experience do you have?
• are your prices competitive?

Other users will value the story of you and your business — and, more abstractly, the story of your relationship with the user now and in the future. Part of what branding does is provide a foundation for the relationship with your clients. Developing your content is definitely part of your branding, and should be consistent with how you present yourself in all areas.

Like The Bee Gees said, it is only words. There’s nothing to fear except writing too much, or failing to provide useful information. Short, simple website content using plain words and bulleted lists will tell your users what they want to know. And that will make your website work for you and for them.

For an even more detailed look at writing for the web, we encourage you to read Jakob Nielsen’s excellent article.

Brandan got you going with part 1 of this tutorial — the technical foundation for your site.

If you didn’t go through our short list of discovery questions earlier, now is a great time. With your answers in hand, we can tackle the creative process.

Gather content

Start with what you do know

Chances are you’ve already got something that talks about your business — a print ad, a business plan, etc. Get together materials like that, plus any photos, videos, and your company logo. Need a logo? We do that too — just ask.

Imagine your website is a brochure

Like a good brochure, your site does two important things:

• Talks to a targeted audience — who is your audience?
• Communicates useful, actionable facts — what do you want to say?

But, unlike a brochure, a website is all about user experience. So the most important question to answer is what do your visitors want/expect?

Find examples

Let’s be clear — it is not okay to cut and paste someone else’s work. But it can be extremely helpful to look around other websites and see:

• What you like
• What your competitors are doing
• What your industry is doing
• What your customers might expect to find on your site

Show us websites that have information and/or features that you like. We’ll never plagiarize, but we will take your input into consideration.

Ask for help

If you want to tackle writing your own content, I’ve put together some pointers. However, if you feel out of your depth, Lime Tiger is happy to turn your raw materials into engaging, informative content. Talk to us about content creation anytime.

Create a wireframe

Starting to build

With all of your content in hand — and not before — we can concentrate on the structure of your site. Just as if we were building a home, we want to make sure you have a sturdy structure that:

• Supports your content
• Is arranged sensibly
• Can be added to

Your wireframe is basically a flow chart showing how each part of your website is connected. It will probably take several iterations of a wireframe in order to get the structure’s flow just right.

The page bone’s connected to the navigation bone

Everyone expects an arm to connect to a wrist, and a wrist to a hand, and so on. It’s the same with your site structure. Even before they’ve seen your site, visitors expect certain things to be in certain places. We can help you know what a typical user expects, like clicking your logo to get to the home page.

(But unless your business is ABOUT breaking the rules, the Internet is not the place to try it. A confused visitor will just leave.

Yeah, I used to be a loner and a rebel too, Dottie…)

Occasionally, we need to revise our estimate at this point. Five pages of content can easily become six or seven in order to make sense and be easy to use. If this situation comes up, we’ll discuss your options.

Don’t look back

Now you’re ready to get a visual look. Small things may still need to change throughout the rest of the process, but at this point all of the content is present and accounted for in the wireframe. If you add new content or change the flow of information after this point, you’re changing the scope of the project — and that means more work, time, and money.

Design page layouts

From here, we’ll use your existing visual identity to create pages that organize and present your content while maintaining your “look.” Usually, we mock up an illustration of your home page, often with placeholder copy (lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, etc.), to give you an idea of how text, photos, and graphics look on the page.

After a round or two of tweaking the home page mock-up, we’ll get your green light to start building all the pages. If there are very complex or technical pages, we’ll ask you to approve those mocked-up layouts as well before actually building them.

Yep, after all this, there still isn’t a website. Brandan and I will now work together to build a test site where you can see everything in action. Once all the pages are online, approved by you, and tested in multiple web browsers, we’ll unveil your site to the world.

More about this final part of the journey in part 3!

You’ve decided it’s time to set up your first website. Great! So…now what?

Our short list of discovery questions gives us a basic starting point. After going over the answers you provide, we’ll begin with the more technical side of setting up your site:

• Registering a domain
• Signing up for hosting
• Creating and configuring your e-mail accounts

Let’s get to it!

Register a domain

First things first: you need a domain. Your domain name will be on business cards, in Google, maybe even on billboards and television ads, so you need to make it count.

Choose a good domain name

Make your domain name memorable and descriptive. If you own Robert’s Plumbing Company, people will more likely remember robertsplumbingcompany.com than robsplumbco.com or thebestplumbingaround.com. Don’t sacrifice memorability for brevity or cuteness.

Try to get a “.com” domain. People tend to assume all domains end in “.com” and might not remember that yours is actually a “.net” or “.biz”.

Check availability of your domain name

Once you’ve got a few ideas for domain names, visit a registrar to check their availability.

Here are a couple of registrars we recommend:

• Aplus.net
• Network Solutions

If your favorite domain name isn’t available, the registrar may offer suggestions for similar names, or you may be able to use a different top-level domain (for example, “.net” instead of “.com”). It’s up to you to decide what works best for your business.

Purchase your domain

When you’ve settled on a domain name, it’s time to buy it. Normally, you’ll purchase a domain for a few years at a time, and some registrars may offer discounts for longer-term purchases.

Now that you have your domain registered, you’ll need somebody to host your site. Onward!

Sign up for hosting

Hosting services are responsible for serving your web site’s content to your visitors and managing your e-mail accounts (among many other things).

Our recommended hosting service

We recommend Hosting Rails for affordable, reliable, and flexible hosting. I’ve also written a guide to signing up with Hosting Rails.

Domain Name Service

One important (and confusing) aspect of hosting is Domain Name Service, or DNS. When you type a domain name into your browser — say, www.example.com — a DNS server tells your browser where that domain is hosted and how to get content from that domain.

When you sign up with your hosting service, you’ll be given one or more DNS name servers, and you’ll be responsible for entering these name servers into your domain registrar account. This process varies with each domain registrar, so I’m afraid I can’t go into detail here.

Just remember this:

• Your hosting service provides you with name servers.
• Your domain registrar needs to know what those name servers are.

The rest is cake.

Know your billing schedule

Many hosting services offer discounts to customers who sign up for longer-term contracts — e.g., a 12-month contract may cost $6/month, but a 24-month contract only costs $4/month.

Make sure you know when your hosting contract expires. If you don’t set up automatic payment, or if your credit card on file is no longer valid, your site will be taken down until you reactivate your account. You shouldn’t lose any data, but you will certainly lose the confidence of your customers.

Set up your e-mail accounts

Once you’ve signed up for hosting, you’ll be able to set up e-mail accounts and optionally configure a mail client like Outlook to check your e-mail.

Mail servers and mail clients

Before you can receive e-mail at your domain, you’ll need to create e-mail accounts. Typically, you’ll log into your hosting service account and create your e-mail accounts there.

Each service is different, so I can’t provide many details here. I have written more about setting up e-mail with Hosting Rails, our recommended hosting service, so that’s a good place to start.

Once you’ve created an account, many hosting services will help you configure a mail client to check e-mail for that account. You’ll need several bits of data:

• incoming mail server
• outgoing mail server
• account username and password
• account type (POP or IMAP)

You might also refer to your e-mail client’s documentation if you still have questions.

Using webmail

As an alternative to an e-mail client, hosting services also offer webmail, allowing you to read your e-mail from anywhere you have access to a web browser.

For many hosting services, you can access your webmail though a sub-domain of your domain name. For example, if you own the domain example.com, you could visit webmail.example.com to check your e-mail.

Next up: the creative process

Now comes the fun part! Once all the drudgery of domain-registering and hosting-providering is out of the way, we’ll work with you to create an engaging, informative, beautiful site.

Angie is writing an article discussing the creative side of our work, and I’ll post a link here as soon as she’s finished.

In the meantime, head over the the contact page and get started today!

If you haven’t purchased a domain name yet, you might want to read my article on purchasing a domain name. Or go ahead and sign up for hosting without a domain. (Just leave that field blank on the sign-up form.)

Our favorite service, Hosting Rails Site5, is ideal for websites built in Ruby on Rails. But regardless of how we build your site, Site5 is a great host with top-notch customer service.

Step-by-step sign-up

1. Go to the Site5 shared hosting page
2. Go to the bottom of the first column (“basic”) and click “order now”
3. Choose “hostBasic” from the pull-down menu
4. Type in your domain name, or leave it blank if you don’t have one yet
5. Choose 1 or 2 years of service (you’ll save 23% by purchasing 2 years up-front, but if you need to leave before the term is up, you won’t be refunded for unused time)
6. Enter your contact and billing info
7. Review your info, agree to the terms of service, and complete your order

The welcome e-mail

Once you’ve finished filling out the forms, you’ll receive a welcome e-mail with a boatload of technical information about your new hosting service.

Save this e-mail. Save it in a couple of places, and then save it again. It’s not the end of the world if you lose your welcome e-mail, but it has a lot of important technical information, and it’s a pain to recover this information via support e-mails and phone calls.

Last of all, forward that e-mail to me, and we’ll get to work on your site!

Just the beginning

Now that your site is hosted, we’ll create a private URL where you (and anyone else you include) can monitor its development.

Get in touch if you have any questions, or head on over to Site5 and sign up!