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So you've decided you want so have a website designed for your company. You've had a brainstorming meeting with your staff and are starting to think about what you consider to be the important aspects of the site; what colours to use, where you want your pictures to appear and whether or not your web designer should make your logo spin from right to left or from left to right. Stop! There are far more important considerations that need to be made and this article will tell you the main things that cannot be overlooked by a website designer if their intention is to build a successful business website that will deliver a return on your investment.

1. The Goal of the Website

The goal of the website needs to be carved in stone; well I suppose just writing it down would suffice! What do you want to achieve by having the website designed? This could be something as simple as publishing contact details on the internet. It could be something a lot more specific such as:

To have 500 users sign up to your newsletter in the first year. To sell £10000 worth of products over the internet in your first year. To achieve 10 sales enquiries per day through the website.

Whatever the goal of the website is, make sure that you are clear about what it is and that your web designer know exactly what this is and what the website should deliver. Your website will then be designed with this in mind and will have a measurable goal. Imagine building a house, putting the roof on and then telling the builder you wanted a double garage as well - this often happens to website designers!

2. Who Your Target Audience Is

It is very, very important to know who your target audience is. This needs to be very clear right from the very start. This will allow the designer to make the best possible web design decisions to make sure your site is as attractive and accessible as possible to your target audience. Your site after all need to be aimed directly at your target audience in order for them to do whatever it is that you want them to do when they arrive at your site.

3. What Kind Of Content / Keywords Are To Be Used

Your website designer needs to thoroughly understand the nature of your products and services and the things that potential customers will type into search engines to find them. I have had a few clients that have asked me why their products and services aren't listed in Google. One example that stands out in my mind is a lady that asked me why a search for 'coloured concrete' didn't display her site in the results. After I explained that she actually needed to tell search engines on the website that the company sold 'colored concrete' I built a search engine targeted webpage, which was listed in the search results.

Please try and bear in mind that web designers although they are trained to ask intelligent questions, they are not mind readers and know a lot less about your industry and your business than you do. The best thing you can do is to provide as much information and detail up front so that the designer organise your website in the best way possible.

Conclusion:

It's a sad fact that a lot of websites are designed badly and deliver bad results for good customers but by following the advice in this article, you can be sure of 3 things:

Your website project will have a clear, well defined and measurable goal
Your website will be correctly themed and aimed at your target audience
Provision will be made for your content and nothing will be missed out

If you're trying to entice people return to your site from the Explorer's Favorites menu, it helps to prompt them with a special logo of some kind. If you're in Explorer right now and pull down that menu, you'll probably find some of those logos lined up next to the selections in the Channels item. For very little effort, you can have the same thing next to your own site's name.

This little icon is called a "favicon", and it works only in Explorer 5 and above. If your visitors are running Netscape or an older version of Explorer, the browser will just ignore your little icon.

When an Explorer 5 user bookmarks your page, Explorer searches for a special icon with the name "favicon.ico". If it finds one, it replaces the default Microsoft icon with your special little icon next to your name in the favorites menu and in the location bar. The user can also put your icon on the desktop and the taskbar, though few are likely to bother.

The icon you create has to be exactly 16 pixels by 16 pixels. There are some alternative larger sizes, but only use these if you've investigated favicon use very thoroughly. The safest route is definitely 16x16. Try to fool the browser with a larger or smaller size and it will usually ignore you. You should also stick with 16 Windows colors. Again, more colors can be used in sophisticated icons, but 16 is your safest bet.

There are two routes to creating your icon. You can take an existing graphic, maybe a BMP or a GIF, and convert it using graphics software. Unfortunately, some icon converters don't do a good job of transforming bitmaps into .ico files.

The alternative is to use a dedicated icon editor. There's one included in Mocrosoft Visual Studio, and an online Java editor you can try at http://www.favicon.com/. In the long run, you'll probably find it faster to use an icon editor to create your graphic from scratch, rather than converting an existing graphic and ironing out the inevitable bugs.

When you save the .ico, name it "favicon.ico". That's the default icon that Explorer looks for. If you want other pages to have different icons, you can do that too. Name each icon differently, but make sure they all have .ico extensions.

To have Explorer pick up the default favicon.ico, copy it into the root directory - the main directory that holds your HTML pages. If all you want is favicon.ico to be associated with your site, you're done. Every time a visitor bookmark your site with Explorer, favicon.ico is copied to the visitor's cache, where it waits to be displayed. You don't even need to alter your HTML.

However, there are some other tricks you might want to play. If you want a different icon associated with special pages, use the LINK tag on those pages like this:



When visitors bookmark this page, instead of favicon.ico they'll get mypage.ico. You can direct the browser to any absolute location you want using:



Of course, there are weirdnesses to take into account. If you test the favicon on your own site, you may get only one shot at it. Once a site is bookmarked, it's hard to flush out that listing completely. Even if you delete the pages from your cache, delete the listings from the Favorites menu, and reboot, re-bookmarking a previously bookmarked site may not cause the new icon to "take". If this happens, enlist the help of somebody who hasn't previously bookmarked your page.

One other potential snag is that some Web hosts don't support .ico files. If you use one of these, contact the company and politely ask them to start supporting .ico files.

If you follow these guidelines you should find it all relatively straightforward. The only time-consuming parts are getting used to an icon editor and then creating your icon or fixing the problems with your converted graphic. For relatively little effort, you too can give your site that customized cutting-edge look in IE5.

I hope this came in useful!