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Cheap Web Design - What You Get

In the "What You Need" article of this group, I discuss how you can get a cheap web design without sacrificing quality by providing the right tools. Give your web designer attractive graphics, a presentable layout, and interesting text to work with, and you can get a highly respectable website for a low cost. But then comes the question: why bother with a web designer in the first place? If you're doing all the graphics and text yourself, aren't there a bunch of free templates that you can use to get them up on the web just as well? In short, what do you get from a web designer when you're already providing most of what will be going into the site?

The first and most important thing that you get from a designer is knowledge and experience. Although the designer is not likely to create things for you if you want a very low-cost website, a reputable web designer won't just throw your site together and call it a day. These professionals can provide advice ranging from telling you how the size or file type of your graphics might affect the website, if your text is decently optimized for the search engines (assuming you provide the keywords you are trying to optimize for), and if the layout is likely to be too busy or cluttered. In some cases, the designer may even be willing to make minor edits and modifications to save you some time tweaking things. You can also get advice on using your website to its fullest, things like choosing a good hosting company and ideas for improving your layout.

Second, you get a website built using the tools and tricks of the trade, not just the pre-formatted, possibly out-of-date code of a template. This means a professional stylesheet that can make editing the layout much easier, properly optimized title and meta tags, maybe even some simple scripting functions such as buttons that change on mouseover. Some web designers may even incorporate more advanced code when creating a site just to make it easier for them. For example, even when a website doesn't quite rate the advanced server-side coding that php usually entails, the designer may still use include functions in conjunction with a stylesheet to get the same layout on all pages, further easing future changes.

And never forget that this means that you have a professionally-designed website made by a skilled creator who now knows your project and your product. If you later choose to expand your site, you already know where to find someone to do it; and this time, you can have your designer go all-out with more advanced coding and features.

Simple websites can be boons to a web designer; they may not pay much in and of themselves, but they likely pay the most for the time spent, and they don't come with the hassles of more advanced coding. As such, a designer worth its salt will do its best to provide its clients with every possible advantage for their cheap web designs. Elaborate graphics and powerful code may be beyond your budget, but you can do worse than having a professional's knowledge augmenting your site. When you hire a website designer to create a simple site, rather than slapping it together with a template, skill and experience are what you pay for, and those are exactly what you get.