Website Design


Off-Topic Discussions


I really like this community and like to give back in little ways when it works out. As you may have read on a thread or three, my partner and I just began a consulting (sales, management, and staffing) company. We will soon be needing a spiffy super cool, yet affordable new website and have no such skills of our own. Is there anyone out there who does or can point me to someone who does nice, high quality, yet affordable to the common man web design? Any help is appreciated.

Honestly, I have no idea whatsoever is really involved or what it could/should cost so any feedback on that is appreciated as well.

Thank you in advance.


shamgar wrote:

I really like this community and like to give back in little ways when it works out. As you may have read on a thread or three, my partner and I just began a consulting (sales, management, and staffing) company. We will soon be needing a spiffy super cool, yet affordable new website and have no such skills of our own. Is there anyone out there who does or can point me to someone who does nice, high quality, yet affordable to the common man web design? Any help is appreciated.

Honestly, I have no idea whatsoever is really involved or what it could/should cost so any feedback on that is appreciated as well.

Thank you in advance.

I am sure that most of the posters on these boards are probably exactly what you are looking for. (me excluded of course as I have not a clue) However, I do happen to have a very close friend I've known for twenty years who is a whiz at website stuff. If you cannot find anyone please feel free to e-mail me and I will be happy to put you in touch with her.

Edit: Don't ask me why I thought I needed to quote you, I haven't any idea.

Paizo Employee Director of Narrative

Word! My company, well the one I work for, could use some new web digs.


Something you'll want to consider (because it makes web designing/building easier) is to think about the purpose of the website. (Brochure-style, meaning just information, or a transactional site with shopping cars n' all that.) Once you've figured out the purpose, be ready for some content to put up. Who you are, what you're doing, past projects/clients.

Just a couple of tips for you!

Liberty's Edge

Macromedia Dreamweaver MX is the best web-dev tool I've ever used. You don't need to know a whole lot of HTML (but it helps). It's got built in FTP. The downside, it's uber-expensive, but if you can write it off on your taxes as a business expence, it might be worth it. I haven't used it since college (4-years ago), so they may have come out with a new version since then, but Dreamweaver MX is awesome, the earlier versions are good to if you can get them cheap. Also, it helps to learn HTML, then all you need is notepad.


I know nothing about html but I needed a website for my portfolio once I got out of college. So I bought Dreamweaver 8 on amazon along with the Visual Quickstart Guide (which contains step-by-step instructions and a lot of pictures) and I had a website up and running in a week or two (I'll point out that I had also saved handouts from some classes in college). The programs are $300-400, which is an awful lot (especially for the unemployed, i.e. me) but it comes with all kinds of formats, and most importantly, you'll be able to update your site yourself. So once you've used it to actually make your site, put it up and update it a few times, it will have easily payed for itself compared to hiring a web designer to do it all for you.

You also need to buy a domain name and hosting space. I used Register.com and PHPWebhosting.com. It came out to about a $400/$500 investment for those two, but I'm set for two to three years and I have a lot of space.

Hope this helps.


I've just updated two sites on request, and used basically PSPad (a supped-up Notepad). You can whip out a site fairly easily with any WYSIWYG editor, and there are several free ones (Amaya, SeaMonkey, Nvu, KompoZer).

Some things to keep in mind--what is your client base using for web browsing? Lots of folks use IE (v6, with folks starting to migrate to v7). Others use FireFox, Opera, Safari, etc. Certain browsers support certain features while others do not. You can build a site with all kinds of nifty "stuff" but if your user base can't see that stuff it's not as useful. For instance, the PNG format for graphics can do some neat stuff with transparencies, allowing for impressive visual tricks. However, IE v6 doesn't support PNGs all that well. Staying on the cutting edge of technology can thus bite you.

I don't believe in coding to the lowest common denominator (i.e. making sure somebody using IE v3 can still see everything on my page), but at the same time I don't support using every bell and whistle available (Flash, ActiveX, Java, etc.). When using anything, whether it be a funky script to make something neat happen on the page or a high-quality graphic, always remember that the impact will be lost if it takes so long to load people prefer to just hit "Back" and go somewhere else.

Another item--standards compliance. There are "standards" set for web content that are (theoretically) supposed to keep everyone on the same level as long as a site declares what standard it is using. As with the "nifty stuff" above, certain browsers are more standards compliant than others. Opera is the most compliant I've seen, and oddly IE has traditionally been one of the least compliant (v7 is better than any thus far). This is important because the way a site is designed--whether it be using tables for layout, using DIVs (called "layers" in some apps), using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS), etc. may affect how it displays from browser to browser.

As with the bells-and-whistles stuff, I think compliance to standards is something you have to balance with an eye to your audience. My pages are fully XHTML 1.0 Strict compliant, but this is largely because I've found such pages to be the most portable between browsers. Compliance at this level also helps with accessibility, an important consideration if you expect to have folks with disabilities visiting your site.

As far as cost, I have no idea. I did all this work for free, as it's for a non-profit org. I'd recommend trying your own hand at it first--it's really not that hard--then see where you need to go from there. Unless, of course, you are planning on doing actual business (i.e. moving money) through your site. If your doing that, make sure you get somebody that knows how to do this securely. One website breach and your company could go down in flames.

EDIT: A few links for you...

World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) - the standards folks
HTML Dog - a quick, easy, and free set of tutorials on web design (helped me get back up to speed, as I hadn't done any web work in about a decade until the above request came along)
ColorMatch - helping all us color-challenged folks figure out nice complimentary colors!
Free Website Templates - pick a template, tweak a few things, ready to go!
Andreas Viklund's Templates - more free templates. I really like this guy's work as it's visually appealing, standards compliant, and easy to update/modify as needed

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