Each day, small businesses, entrepreneurs, and anyone trying to get their business or message across, seek web developers. Those that are financially successful resort to website companies to tackle their projects. The rest of us who are tight on cash, resort to searching for reasonable website gurus.
When we first decided to become high-tech clothing moguls and form a start-up, we knew nothing about websites. However, since we are engineers, we did perform a bit of research and determined that we needed a web developer that knows how to make a good-looking, user-friendly web platform, and that was also capable of creating new complex code for the back end. Finding the right person to fulfill our requirements was like searching for a needle in a haystack. We learned this is true because most of the affordable web developers can only perform “half” the job.
We discovered that there are two main types of web developer breeds:
Designer Web Developers – These people have mastered the art of making things look pretty (they know Dreamweaver, HTML, and have graphic design skills) but lack programming skills.
Programmer Web Developers – These people have mastered the art of writing logic (code)and creating databases but lack the ability to draw a box (graphic design skills).
We found that most people who claim to know how to create websites are really only, “half developers”. In fact, this is one of the primary reasons why Tim and I learned everything ourselves.
Since most people will not have the time to learn web development we highly recommend that you find a “full developer” who knows how to make things look pretty and who also knows code. This might take some time but having patience might be the difference between having a website that meets your demands, and having a website on the internet that does not.
Furthermore, make sure your “full developer” knows how to SEO (search engine optimize) your website as he creates it. There is no point in having a really cool website if it cannot be found by web users, Google, Yahoo, or Bing. Sadly, less than 20% of websites on the internet have been search engine optimized. In fact, properly SEOing a website will help reduce on-line advertising costs but most people don’t know that. It is less cumbersome to SEO right from the start rather than to modify your website structure once it has been created. Our updates to AviatorTees.com will mostly involve SEO work so that users successfully find their favorite
airplane t-shirts when searching for them.
SEOing is not just the responsibility of the “full developer” though. Clients should know that there are many things they can do to increase their page rank in search engines that are not website related like: registering with a search engine, adding your site to a directory, blogging, etc. The internet is expanding with a surplus of new websites each day. This means that website owners must SEO their sites if they want to be found. Hence, staying on top of shit will bring you to the top.
Jon Navarro