Today website is very important marketing tool and sometimes your website is THE core of your business, especially when you are an online retailer. If you decide to design or re-design your website, you need to have a plan 1st and then get a quote.

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1. What do you want to achieve with the new website?

Why do you need a website? Why do you need to change your website? What kind of business image you want to present? Have you visited your competitors’ websites? Have you got some new ideas that can improve the website? It’s very important to define what the web design project is because when you meet with us, that’s normally the first question we will ask. If you only have a rough picture of how the website will work, you can talk to us and we can make recommendations to you. But it is very essential you know your own business model and process. That’s the part we can’t help!!

2. Make your budget and stick to it

The quality and the features of the website depend very much on the budget. If you have a low budget, the programmer and graphic designer will have great pressure to finish the work within that budget. Therefore, you need to talk to your marketing people and decide what features you want and set your budget. If you have a budget, you had better stick to it. If you need to have more functions for your website, you had better leave it to stage 2 in the future.

3. Collect quotes

You need to contact a few design agents and see what they can offer.
Within a quote document, you will normally be given these information:
How many pages your website will have?
What’s the time scale of the project? Does that time scale suit you?
Will there be animation? Flash animation normally costs more than static HTML pages.
Mostly, how much does it cost.
You need to know more of the following if you are not given this information.

• The support: All website needs ongoing maintenance. You probably want to change some text or images of your website. When the website goes wrong, can you get hold of them easily? Are they friendly? Do they provide both Email and phone support. Spark computing provides support on MSN, Yahoo Messenger and Skype as well.
• Technical background: Do they have strong in-house technical and designing staff? Can you talk to their technical staff directly? You may not have honest answer from a salesman! Spark computing has Ph.D in computer science in the technical team.
• Case studies: You need to look at their portfolio to see if they have the capability and experience to deal with your project.

4. Project management

When you choose a web design company, you probably pay 30% deposit in advance so that they can pay their bills while doing your work. Spark computing will create a test area so that you can view your progress. The design process is a very-interactive process. We will proposal several initial design templates to you. You would make comments on them and choose one so that we can proceed with the design style/colors/logo you selected. If you find that project is not progressing according to schedule, you will ring and ask why.

When the project get finished, there will be testing and spark computing will give you instructions on how to use the admin system if your website is database driven. When you are happy with everything, you will receive the final invoice.