Rapid Prototype Blog

Posts Tagged ‘website’

Hiring a web design firm to redesign your business website is a big decision. You want to be sure that the company is a good fit for you and can accommodate your needs in a manner that best suits you.

Below are four things to consider when hiring a web designer or web design firm:

1. Budget: Many business owners might consider website expenses an area where they can skimp. I strongly urge against this. A website is a crucial part of your brand image. Without a website that accurately portrays your brand message, you’re providing clients with a perception of your brand that isn’t correct. This can have severe consequences for the success of your business.

When looking to hire a website designer, you want to be sure that you are getting the best website possible. This doesn’t mean that the most expensive web design firm web design firm is the way to go. That’s why you have to research all of your options.

Business owners who spring for the cheapest website design firm with the hopes that the firm will give them a satisfactory product is by no means the right mindset to have. A low-budget firm that provides generic template designs cannot possibly create a website that is in line with your brand image.

Your brand is special and different from your competition, right? If you hire a design firm that provides you with a generic web design interface, you’re not expressing to your audience that you’re special. Rather, you’re showing prospects that you provide a generic and average service. You won’t stand apart from the competition, and you won’t see the business success you desire.

A successful website is customized, easy to navigate, and effective in driving prospects and customers to take action. A web design company that can provide you with a website that embodies all three of these characteristics is exactly what you want. But not every design company knows how to do this—which is why the successful ones tend to be on the higher price range. They have a skill that is difficult to find in other firms.

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If you’re not ready to spend a large sum of money on your website just yet, then hold off a bit longer until you have the budget to get your website done right the very first time. I’ve seen many business owners go through several ineffective website designs before hiring the right firm to get the job completed exactly to their liking. These business owners have wasted thousands of dollars by choosing a design company that was low budget.

2. Location: Would you rather your web designer be located within driving distance, or does it matter to you where they’re located? That’s definitely a question you want to ask yourself. This tidbit of information will help you narrow your search. We’ve worked with several design firms in the past. Some were located across the country, others in our city. We don’t mind working with design firms across the country. If they’re the perfect fit for us or our clients, then we’ll use them. We won’t force a fit with a company in our city if we’re not crazy about them.

3. Previous Designs: Always view both the firm’s testimonials and portfolio. Just looking at a design company’s portfolio isn’t going to tell you what it’s like to work with them. They could produce an excellent product but cause their clients massive headaches and stress. You want a firm that is easy to work with and provides you with the best product possible.

Testimonials will tell you the experience past clients had with the company, and a portfolio will show you the types of websites and designs they produce.

If you don’t see testimonials or a portfolio on a designer’s site, this could be a red flag. You shouldn’t have to ask a firm to send you images of their past designs—these items should be easy to find on their website.

Some things to look for in a company’s previous designs include . . .

Ease of navigation through the site.
Effectiveness in encouraging site visitors to take action.
Visual aesthetics.
Static HTML pages that contain optimized web copy and images that can be crawled by search engines. When an entire site is flash-based, it cannot be crawled by search engine spiders and robots.

4. Your Gut Feeling: Always trust your gut feeling. If a company rubs you the wrong way—even if you can’t pinpoint what’s causing the bad feeling—don’t go with them. You want to feel completely comfortable with and confident in the firm you choose. If you’re uncertain about anything, address your concerns with the company. And if you’re still unsure about working with them, hold off and look for other firms that might suit your needs.

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There are thousands of web design directories that provide a listing service for web design companies. A Google search for ‘website design company directory’ shows over 184,000,000 results from pages worldwide. Most directories provide no value-added functionalities for web design members or users. How do such directories help a business looking for a web design company? The simple answer is they don’t!

Let’s face it, choosing a web design company is a pretty tough job when you are not really sure what to look for in a company. Do you go for the best price? The company who is based closest to you? A friend who designs sites as a hobby? Or one that was recommended by the company next door? To date, the industry has mostly worked through referrals, and Which Web Design Company is the first to take this concept to the Web.

At Which Web Design Company a business can search and find web design which matches their particular criteria – whether that’s price, location or type of website required. They can narrow down their choice by reading ratings and reviews by previous clients and can contact the web design company directly.

Which Web Design Company was created to bring value back into the web design industry. It’s crucial for businesses to be able to find the right web design company for their industry. It’s time the web design industry distinguished itself – many web design companies have already hocked onto the fact that they need to work with a niche industry to create successful websites. Web designing is more than just putting together pages to form a website; it’s about creating a marketing tool. And to do this, it’s an absolute must to understand the company’s industry, understand the business’s objectives – because the whole point in building their website is to achieve these targets through the Internet. WWDC creates a platform for people to be able to find a website design company which is best suited to their industry, a company that will understand who their customers are and how to reach out to them.

Related Industrial Design Company Articles

From stunning CGI & 3D animation services to graphic and website design, Creation Studio offers a wide range of services to suit any design or presentation requirement Our team is built on creative professionals with a good eye for design, technical skills and their ability to create anything you can imagine, utilising cutting edge technology and software to complete your project within budget and schedule. Our core activities are 3D design & animation, 3D visualisation, website design & development, search engine optimisation, illustration, graphic design, architectual design, filming, editing & dvd authoring, more information on any of our services can be found on our website www.creationstudio.co.uk

I was wondering what tools developers out there use for prototyping/wireframing, something that is quick and easy and good for getting client agreement. I had a look at jumpchart.com, but it was a little too time consuming for my purposes.

Hello and thanks in advance for reading this!!
How can I get my new website listed for search engines easily? I would like it to show up in the top somewhere. My website is www.giesinc.com and I designed it with my keywords as follows in an area where they told me to put them on using SiteBuilder: (rapid,prototype,fdm,prototyping,prototy… model, abs, dimension, sst, printer, metro, detroit, area, shipping, overnight,sameday,design,services,CAD,mo… I offer nationwide delivery of solid model prototypes with same-day local service (Metropolitan Detroit Area), and overnight delivery nationwide. Prototypes are made from 3D CAD models and printed on a special printer that prints the model in 3D using ABS plastic.
Does it cost me anything to have the site listed and to keep it higher in rankings? Tx so much for your help!
Nate www.giesinc.com

After finishing your project and presenting to the client, sometimes it’s needed to do usability tests with a prototype, to understand real users’ needs. So, you can export your hi-fi wireframe into HTML, or even test it remotely using Justinmind Server.

Before doing the test, is recommendable that you:

Prepare the test questions

If it’s an eCommerce site, you’ll need the users to buy something. Maybe have them fill a form and submit it correctly. Ask them questions about information on the site: ex: “how much does the book Hamlet costs?” or “does this site ships to England?”.

Note that these tasks should be the ones users will do more frequently, and pay attention to their mistakes or if they don’t understand something. If it happens to them, may happen to other users.

Do not include hints, or help them complete the tasks. It’s important to understand what users feel difficult to do.

Start with the easier tasks. It helps them improve confidence, and sometimes users get nervous when they cannot complete the first task. Reassure them that there’s nothing wrong if they make mistakes. It’s their job to find the potential mistakes, anyways.

Remember always that when a user fails a usability test, it’s a win situation: you can correct something that can be very harmful and dangerous: investing time and money in a bad usability website.

Finding users for a usability test

It’s important to find potential users to your site. Do not test your social network for old ladies with your graphic design friends. They use computers and have different tastes, goals and approaches to a website.

It’s not needed to test with more than 5 people, according to some researchers. Most of the conclusions with more people are repetitive and come to the same results, so 5 is considered the magic number.

During the test of your wireframe

There’s no need to help the users. If the user cannot complete the task alone, it’s ok. Note that down, and reassure him that there’s no problem. Everything users do may be important, from what they do to what they say during the test. Note that down. After the test, ask users why they’ve done something you didn’t understand.

After the test

Tell them it’s important to understand the tasks they couldn’t do, and then improve the site. Explain them how it was designed to work, because you can find more conclusions there. They must know their feedback is important.

Get all the conclusions and write a report of changes that should be done to the prototype, and, if possible, test again.

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Wireframes are good to show how the web will look like. Sitemaps are used to show the navigation structure.

But none of them show how a website works.

The main focus of a prototype is not the appearance of the website, but content, structure and functionality. Back in the 90’s, HTML didn’t allow for much more than visual presentation of text and static images with links. Nowadays, there are plenty of sites that work as software, interacting, changing behaviour and content according to user’s responses. This makes the working part of a website the most important thing to be focussed, discussed and planned.

So, before building any software or website that’s more complex than a printed leaflet, you should build a prototype of it to understand how it’s going to work, and plan ahead how you’re going to build it.

Structure is basically naming and organizing elements of the pages, such as links and categories. It also involves the basic sizes and shapes of objects, but not in a way that hinders designers’ work. The low fidelity wireframes stand in this part of the project.

Categorization is normally done with card sorting and text files, but as projects get more and more complex, it’s becoming even more necessary to simulate them.

Content also is very important, and it is great to have clients approve it before seeing the visuals. Many people get obfuscated with logos, colours and shapes, and can only think about that when they were supposed to analyse the texts, the information and the story being told. If you present a black and white prototype, it’s easier to get everyone focused on what’s written, and after that pass on to the design.

Functionality is very important, and cannot be visualized with old paper wireframes, or plain mockups. With rich interaction, you can simulate clicks, filling forms, voting, wrong passwords, and most of the experiences a user have with real websites. That way, it’s possible to prevent mistakes such as asking too much information in your login forms, or users being unable to click on determined objects when they want to.

It is important to discuss and decide the technical functions before start coding, because most of software bugs come from changing plans along the coding stage. It also helps reduce production time, since the rewriting normally takes longer than coding once.