Website Development Melbourne

Modern web sites can be incredibly complex, containing many webpages. It is worth knowing exactly what you want to achieve before you start getting quotes. In general, web sites are used to contribute to these business goals.

• The website creates publicity for the business and get more customer enquiries (mainly through natural search engine results)
• The website supports advertising in attracting more customer enquiries (internet and traditional advertising)
• The website makes a strong first impression on potential customers, which leads to greater sales
• The website makes a first pitch to customers and prompt them to phone or email an enquiry to you
• The website fully supports all the pre-sales customer services, with technical and pricing information
• The website gets direct sales over the internet (e-commerce)
  • Some websites use a webpage to gather payment details for manual processing
  • Other websites automatically process the payment before confirming the sale
• Business use the website to provide after-sales support (such as instructions, warranties, support contact, etc.)
• Businesses get repeat sales by providing useful information to current customers using the web site
• Groups communicate and educate the general public (especially for non-profits, political groups, community groups, etc.) using a web site
• Membership Programs provide communication services for members (especially sporting clubs, social clubs and those charities and businesses that run membership based programs) using a web site
  • Member to member communications over the website
  • Enterprise to member communications over the website

A good website design and development company will be able to translate these goals into a set of requirements and features for your project. Some specialized website development companies will have already developed website applications to achieve these business goals at an affordable price.

It is important to set a realistic budget for a website development project, even if you choose to keep this to yourself during the project commercial negotiations. Setting a budget that is too low will quickly attract a raft of schemes that provide dubious quality by using automatic systems to deliver very basic web sites. Remember that there is a strong cottage industry set-up on the fringes of the web site development industry, and they often will exploit the general public’s ignorance of web sites.

A good start is to consider a budget for a more traditional communications project:

• Design, print and distribute a glossy brochure
• A neon sign in your front window
• A direct mail campaign to 1,000 people per month
• Radio Ads
• TV ads
• A billboard on a main road

Typically, compared to traditional communications, the web site will:

• have a greater audience reach
• will be more effective in converting viewers to sales
• will be more capable in terms of customer service
• Can be extended with more webpages to acheive more goals

The budget can be broken down to these areas:

• Domain names (consider purchasing several to capture traffic in several ways)
• Hosting (better quality hosting is faster and more reliable)
• Website design (mainly graphic design for ‘brochure’ sites, also includes information architecture and usability engineering for more complex web sites)
• Website development
  • Standard features (included in the features of the Content Management System)
  • Custom features
• Go Live costs (submitting to search engines, testing and researching keywords, building links to your web site to create traffic)
• Maintenance (service level agreements for updates, routine testing, advanced traffic reports

To ensure that your website development project goes smoothly, it is best to find out this information.

• Make a list of your company goals, e.g.
  • New business
  • Direct sales
  • Pre-sales customer service
  • After-sale customer service
  • Educate or publish information
• Make a note of an appropriate budget
• Write down any passwords that might be needed:
  • Domain passwords
  • Hosting passwords
• Have a look at potential domain names
  • Based on your business name
  • Based on the name of your product or service
• Consider suitable deadlines, sometimes a small web site can be developed quickly, to be followed by a full web site later
• A draft of the website content is always helpful when the quotes are being prepared
• Any notes on your preferences for how the webpages are linked is useful
• Make a list of websites that you want to link to, and have links from
• A short list of websites and webpages that you like to look of
• A list of direct competitor's webpages so that they can be researched
• Copies of all logo artwork and any photos or illustrations on CD-ROM

The good news about website development in Melbourne is that there is an enormous talent pool available. This is due to the attractiveness of Melbourne for creative people and the presence of some outstanding educational opportunities. Many other cities envy Melbourne creative talent.

The down-side of this enormous talent pool is that there are many small firms that may not be stable and may not be fully developed in terms of business process. There are many very talented freelancers in Melbourne, but not all of them are capable of a complex web site project or have access to the full range of web site promotional tools.

Consider these things:

• The history of the firm
• The size of the firm – balance the processes of a larger firm with the personal service of a small one
• The studio management skills of the company – do they have processes to manage multiple projects and provide on-going support?
• The availability of website maintenance contracts that don’t lock you in to unfair software licensing deals
• The website design portfolio – do you like the work?
• The website development projects – does the company regularly develop robust and usable web pages?
• Whether they have an enterprise quality Content Management System
  • With ongoing website development support
  • With the capability of properly realizing any graphic design treatment
  • With a solid list of extra functions available at reasonable cost
  • Capable of scaling to handle large traffic flows
  • Built on a robust and widespread technology like Microsoft’s ASP.NET
• The friendliness and listening skills of the team – creating unique brand experiences requires good communication skills
• The firm should have a system to capture, prioritize and deal with issues as they arise

Good luck with your website development project!