Websites 101

Website Terminology

A BEGINNERS GUIDE TO THE WONDERFUL WORLD OF WEBSITES.

  • Branding is your company's visual identity. A brand identity usually consists of a logo, a style of images, colour scheme and fonts that add up to an image that is unique to your company. We can help you with this. We have many years of experience in this area unlike many companies who only build websites. But it doesn't come for free! If someone offers you a free logo with your website you should question just how well considered it is likely to be if they are 'throwing it in' for free. Will it truly represent all of your company's values, be well researched, appeal to your customers and make you stand out from the crowd?
    Content Managment Systems (CMS) provide a way to edit the content of your site yourself. You may hear of free, or open-source, CMS's (such as Joomla!). Open source software has no licence fees and there is no cost to buy the software, however there is a significant cost for the time required to configure the software to be used in a website.
    This is all the information that goes into your website, including photos, text (sometimes called copy), maps, etc When preparing and editing content for websites, it is important to consider how to organise and present it and how people will interact with it. Think about the tone - is it friendly or even humorous or is it deadly serious? You can write it or we can provide this service.
    As your web designers, we will work with you to design a website that effectively communicates your desired message to your target audience. Web designers understand how people browse for, and interact with, information on the internet. We understand through experience how to design within the technical limitations of the internet. It is common practice to plan your website with a basic sketch (sometimes called a wire-frame). We then refine the design and show you a draft of what the website will look like before we begin programming (sometimes called web development).
    A web developer will take the design drafts and programme them into HTML (code the internet can read). Web development also involves building the functionality of your website. This is how it will work - ie what happens when you click on a button, any moving elements, forms that can be filled in etc
    Your domain name is the unique address of your website - eg transformerdesign.co.nz. You can register your domain name with a registrar such as Domainz or FreeParking or we can do this for you. Your domain name should be used in all your marketing and for your email addresses. You can register multiple domain names for one site but it's best to have one primary domain and redirect the others to that.
    Your email accounts also need to be hosted. The cost is often included with your website hosting. Your email address, e.g. name@website.com, is different from your email account, or mailbox, where your messages are stored and you can have multiple addresses for each account.
    This is also known as HTML emails and sometimes people call them email newsletters. We have a system called Transmitter that can be fully integrated with your website. We design a template for you and you can go into Transmitter, add words and pics and send to your database as often as you want. Before you embark on days of writing take note that short, sharp emails with one clear message and a persuasive call to action will work a lot better than long rambling newsletters!
    Your website needs to be hosted on a server connected to the internet. Unless you have some very advanced inhouse technology you will need to rent space on a web host's server. We suggest you ask us to do this on your behalf. Your domain name(s) will need to point to the host server in order for your website to be viewed on the internet. The host's server should also come with support for special functionality your site may require such as a specific CMS, PHP, databases, security, spam filtering, etc. We can advise you on this. You can opt for 'shared' hosting on a 'public' server with other websites or 'VPS' hosting on a 'private' server that can be configured specifically for your site to get optimal perfomance.
    Having a website is great but without promotion no-one will know it's there. Consider how you are going to advertise your site online and elsewhere.
    Even the most serious business tool needs to grab attention. Have fun surfing the web - what grabs you? A witty headline, an unusual picture, beautiful typography, or moving pictures. Maybe you're drawn to sites with a lot of imagery and decoration or maybe you go for the clean and simple ones. Tell us the sites you like (and the real stinkers) and we'll be able to give you some idea of what they might cost and whether they are right for your brand's needs.
    We're very experienced at planning web projects so we can talk you through the many options available. For most sites we will be able to give you an estimate free of charge. However in some cases you will require a very complex set of functions in your site. In these cases we may need to create a full technical spec that requires many hours of our time. If this is the case we will charge a small fee for this technical spec document. You can then use this to 'shop around' for the web developer (website builder) of your choice. If you choose us to be the web developer then we deduct this fee from the total cost of the site. This would be like taking an architect's plans to various builders for quotes to build it. We will discuss this with you first.
    Search Engine Optimisation refers to 'tweaking' the code and content of your website to get the highest possible ranking in results when someone searches for relevant terms in search engines such as Google. We can help you with this. There are many factors that influence search ranking, including how well your site is programmed or built, how your content is worded, how well the site runs, etc and these should be regularly reviewed.
    On static websites, each page is individual and fixed so needs to be manually edited. Dynamic websites use page templates, or shells, and draw in content stored in a database giving opportunity for much more interactivity, like blogs, comments, personalised content, etc
    It is important to test and measure how well your website is doing and how people are finding your website so you can make changes to maximise the traffic to your site. We recommend and use Google Analytics to track visitors to your site.

    JUST ASK!

    Don't be shy, we won't think you're dumb if you ask a lot of questions! We know it's a confusing world to enter and, provided you're serious about getting a great site, then we're happy to talk you through the process and simplify the jargon as much as we can for you.

    call us today: +64 9 575 9872
    or contact Nigel at
    or Jennifer at