There's a lot of ways to improve your site quickly. One that comes to mind is finding a template that sets the mood you want to convey.

Moods:
* Clean & Professional (lots of white, color accents)
* Soft (drop shadows) with Curvy boxes
* Dark colors combos set more of an intriguing mood

Once you have your mood idealized, look for a template that's already designed.

Pick more than one that look good.

When you talk to a web designer, me for instance, give him your picks and watch how much faster your site goes up!

Far too often, the communication barrier prevents the initial design from coming about as fast as possible. Sometimes this frustration divides the customer & designer, and the interaction is passed off as a dud. The fix is found in just a little preparation.

Once the site look and feel has been chosen...BAM it's live on the web.

Regards,
Mike Stone

Every site does not have to look like a few dollar, generic template, to be cost effective and doable. Your site can look real good, and it should.

I don't know if you have ever visited a website that was a little under the weather, so to speak. For just a few hundred dollars, that site can be transformed and offer the instant credibility that arises from one that is well-designed.

Take a look at the thousands of templates that normally cost between $50-$2000. There are so many (templatemonster.com) and finding one that looks reasonably close to what you want could save you hundreds of dollars.

I'm looking out for you; it's what I do.

Regards,
Mike Stone

Many web design companies charge $1000-$2000 for a site design from an ultra plain template and some content. Sometimes you will want a plain and simple look for your site. However, it's not always the case. Usually, as time has revealed, even a well designed website template will need to be modified to fit the needs of the company's information it is showcasing.

That's why a visit to different sites on the web make you cringe or think, "How could they have paid for this?" But often is the case that a company simply needs an online presence - and they take the web company that they find first, that they connect with. Still, it's a good idea to keep in mind that the quality of your site will help sell your services or products. It's similar to having more credibility with someone. Your site looks like an expert on the subject because it really does look the part.

Regards,
Mike Stone

I will usually get an idea when talking with a client, sketch something on a piece of paper that outlines the site's structure. It will look simple enough, but will look like an empty layout. But this is an important beginning.

Next, I will open Illustrator and make boxes with rounded corners (which is very easy) and other essential starting elements, like perhaps text for navigation. I will then take these simple shapes into Photoshop and add gradients, drop shadows, and accents to the design. Now it's looking good. I sometimes go a step further and create a box (with rounded corners & drop shadow), which matches the layout to be used in the content area. I make sure to have 3 main parts of the page: The header (top part with logo and motto), the content area, and the footer (with text nav links & copyright note). By this point, I have the complete look of the site carved out.

After Illustrator & Photoshop are teamed up, I then take the PSD (Photoshop Document) into ImageReady CS2, which is where I "slice up" the Photoshop image for output onto a web site. My goal is to make the content area stretchable downward, so when more content is added, the sides of the content box, will continue down & look properly (an issue that has to be accounted for).

As I create slices for navigation buttons and also possibly rollover states for them, I also aim to select the ideal type of image compression for each slice. If there is a lot of color in a slide, I will generally use the JPEG 65% quality setting. If there's hardly any color variation, or if the piece is mainly white, I may use the GIF 32 colors choice and fiddle using more or less colors based on the quality & resulting filesize for the image piece.

Once I'm done here, I go to File > Save Optimized As, then it saves the site, broken down into tables and lots of little images, that seamlessly generates the page you see. But as much as I'd like to say that was it, there's still more.

Now I take the .html page generated by ImageReady and take it into FrontPage 2003 (I like it for it's visual interface so much like Word's). Then I go through image-by-image and set each as a cell background matching the width & height of that cell to the image slice that was in the cell, before I delete the image on top.

Now I have the template I will use for each page on the site.

Then make sure the nav buttons (in the header) & nav text (in the footer) are linked to the html pages you will copy next (so if you have a contact page, link it to contact.html). The next step is to copy this page for all of the pages you created links for. Now change the Page Titles of each page, reflecting the section you are in.

Add content to each page, shake, stir, and it's live on the web!

Regards,
Mike Stone

Having a log-in-protected, Self-Updating Manager Section to change your site is often essential.

If you can invest in at least a few pages that you can completely control with a Manager Page, it will give you true power that you deserve. There are details in each page of your site that will be managed quite differently - and the time to create those manager pages will vary because of this.

For example:
Your home page has a paragraph of text, an image on the right, and a box underneath that has your specials. There are 3 parts that will need to be updated.

Your products page will have 30 products each with a title, description, price, disclaimer, and photo. That update page will involve a different layout, and you need more programming so that when you delete one, the following ones get bumped up. You may need to be able to move one down or add one - both different types of updating.

So the idea here is that you understand a little bit of what goes into this, so that you can think about how much you should pay for something like this.

Depending on the amount of tricks you want to have while controlling your site will affect the dollar amount required. For example, if you took the product manager page and simplified it only delete and add a new one, which will always go into 1st position. The time it will take to organize an update page like that will be far less, and remember, when it's simple, it's easy for you to use also. But the update page must be able to perform the functions essential for your needs.

Regards,
Mike Stone