Guidelines For a Successful Web Design Process

Whether or not you decide to become a member of Wired Musician, we'd like to help make the process of finding a good designer, and managing the website design and setup process, go as smoothly as possible for you.

Wired Musician is a great solution for busy professional musicians and ensembles. Some who contact us, however, are not at a point in their career that would make best use of all the rich features of a Wired Musician website. Please feel free to contact us to discuss your situation. We're happy to answer your questions because we hope you'll join us, if not now, then later down the road.

In the meantime, below are some things to keep in mind when starting the process of designing a new website and looking for a website designer. When you see the words Tech Tip! it means that we're providing you either with a tip that will make the project go more smoothly, or some piece of technical information that will allow you to present a more informed set of questions than the average designer is used to hearing.

BEFORE looking for a website designer:

• Determine your budget

  Obviously you need to have some idea what you're able to spend on the design, keeping in mind that there will be other expenses as well — hosting fees, updates, and so on. A minimum amount for a simple website design will be in the range of $200. But if the designer is also going to implement your site (create all the individual pages for you), that fee will increase depending, usually, on the number of pages.

• Be ready with your ideas and content

  So many clients come to Wired Musician with one question on their lips: "How fast can you get my new website up and running?" Inevitably the question isn't how fast the designer can do this, but rather how fast YOU can do it. Most people underestimate how much work getting a new website designed and implemented is going to be for themselves, never mind the designer.

  You need to have the following things ready before you begin this project:

  • Your design ideas

    Build up a list of 4 or 5 websites that you like for various reasons — the color scheme, the way graphics are incorporated into the design, whatever it might be — and provide these to the designer with an explanation for each.

    Do you want multiple layouts? For example, do you want a splash page that is unique on the site, and then a primary layout that will be common to all other pages?

    Wired Musician regards splash pages as unnecessary and recommends against them. They increase your costs and add little to the effectiveness of the site.

    Multiple layouts might be desireable, however, if you want a particular part of your website to look dramatically different from the rest of it. Expect each layout to add about 50% of the cost of a single design.

  • Your photographs, Logo, Marketing Materials

    More than anything, the photographs and other visual materials you want on your website will suggest design elements and color schemes to a good designer, so have them ready either in print form, or scanned into image files.

    If you're an ensemble or other organization, provide the designer with a good, high-resolution version of your logo, if you have one, as well as your marketing materials, especially if they use a particular color scheme or other design elements you'd like the website to use as well.

    Tech Tip! When delivering these materials to the designer in an electronic format, make sure these files are as high a resolution as possible. Photos should be delivered in a "jpg" format (pronounced "jay-peg"). Logos and other graphics can be in any number of different formats, but the most common high-resolution types are "eps" files (say the letters in this case, "e-p-s") or "tiff" files (say "tiff").

    Very high-resolution photo and graphics files can be extremely large, sometimes many megabytes, and you should not send them as E-mail attachments — you might shut down your designer's mail server, and that's never a good way to start a new relationship. The designer may ask you to burn the files onto a CD and send it to him, or upload them to a remote server.

    If you only have prints of your photographs, there are a couple of options:

    • Take your prints to an office supply chain such as Kinko's, Staples or Office Max. They will scan them for you and put them on a CD (while they're at it, have them make a copy of the CD for you as well).

    • Send the prints to the designer, who will scan them for you. Ask first, however, what he will charge for this service.

  • Your content

    A designer is dead in the water without the text you want to appear on your website. You need to have your bio, list of works or repertoire, performances, reviews, discography — and anything else you want on your site — updated and ready.

    Tech Tip! Many people provide their text content in word processor documents that have been heavily formatted: bold text, colors, borders, everything tabbed out into columns. This is generally more work for the designer, rather than less, since all of this has to be stripped out before it can be converted to HTML and placed on your site. In general try to deliver your content as plain text.

    Tech Tip! When delivering tabular data to a designer (such as a list of works with the title in one column, the year in the next, the duration in the next, etc), use your word processor's table function (they all have one) rather than just tabs. This will convert to HTML much more easily later on.

Now that you're ready:

• Seek out designers who can show you a full portfolio of designs

  Obviously you'll choose a designer whose work you admire, but make sure they have done a lot of this kind of work. You'll want to see at least a dozen examples of previous designs.

• Make sure the designer you pick is an experienced WEB designer

  A lot of print designers also like to promote themselves as web designers, and some of them are honestly very good at it. In fact, experienced print designers often are better at thinking "outside the box" — literally. Websites tend to have a boxy look to them, it's in the nature of how HTML — the programming language for your web browser — works. Print designers have an eye for softening the edges.

  Many print designers do not know proper website design, however, and may deliver a product that is difficult to navigate, or riddled with bugs and browser incompatibilities. So:

• Make sure any designer you talk to gives you links to the REAL websites they designed...

  ... not just screen-shots or images. And if the designer is also going to be the person who updates and maintains your site for you, make sure these other websites behave and display properly — if they don't you can bet yours won't either.

• Are this designer's websites easy to navigate?

  Website navigation is the single most important design element: it needs to be obvious how the site is navigated and easy to do. Some designers are fond of making a website act more like a computer game — forcing you to guess where the links are — or they use animated links that are constantly in motion and difficult to click on. (Wired Musician regards this as unacceptable in website design and will not implement designs that employ these kinds of links.)

  Keep in mind who your most important website visitor will be: music administrators and presenters. These are people with little time and no patience for a website that makes them work. Most people expect to find the information they need from a website within 30 seconds, otherwise they leave. For administrators and presenters, you can reduce that to 10 seconds.

• Ask for references

  When the designer provides the website links to you, ask him if you may contact the website owner for a reference. The answer should of course always be "yes." If it isn't, move on.

• Be clear about your budget, ask how the fee is calculated and what is and is NOT included in that fee

  This is the area where many people get burned. Here are some questions to ask:

  • How is the fee being calculated?

    Most designers seem to prefer working for a preset fee, rather than on an hourly basis. Make sure this is clear before you start.

  • What is the payment schedule?

    Most designers will want you to pay some portion of the fee to start the project. This is a reasonable request, after all, since they are investing their time and talent in your design and want to know you're serious. 25% of the fee to start is entirely reasonable (that's what Wired Musician charges). If the fees are low the designer my request up to 50%. You should feel free to negotiate these amounts if you feel they are unjust.

    Some designers, including Wired Musician, will want you to pay along the way, so for example another 25% once the design is agreed upon.

    If the designer is also implementing your website (meaning that he is creating the HTML or other website delivery mechanism for you), make sure you negotiate a schedule that allows you to withhold the final 25% or so until the finished product is delivered. Under no circumstances should you pay the entire fee until your design and/or website is delivered and acceptable.

  • How many designs will the designer do?

    Regardless of the price, any good designer will offer to give you at least two distinct designs to start with. They will likely be a little rough, but that's OK. Keep in mind that he is just trying to get a sense from you if things are going in the right direction in terms of color, fonts, and layout.

    But what happens if you don't like any of them? Will he charge you to do additional ones? Make sure this is specified up front.

  • Is the designer also implementing and maintaining your website?

    In other words, once the design is done, will the designer create all the HTML pages for your site, or is he simply delivering a "template" to you? If the latter is the case, be forewarned that there are other fees coming, either to the designer or to someone else who will do the implementation.

    If the designer is implementing your site for you, he will likely be doing updates over time as well — that is, he will be your web master. These services will not be included in the design fee, so make sure you know beforehand exactly how they are calculated.

    The number one complaint we at Wired Musician hear from new clients is that their current web master makes no promises about the amount of time for updates, and can sometimes take weeks or even months to get around to them. Make sure you express this concern to the designer, or whoever will be mastering your site, and come to an agreement about how updates will be implemented, and what your recourse will be if the updates take more than a certain period of time. (Many people are uncomfortable forcing this issue, but if you are left with a situation in which your only recourse is to take your website elsewhere, you'll wish you had!)

• Tech Tip! Ask if the designer knows how to code and implement Cascading Style Sheets (or CSS)

  Cascading Style Sheets are the state of the art in HTML website design, and provide a level of flexibility and ease of updating that plain HTML never will. Good, well-informed designers will know what CSS is and will happily tell you if they use it (and asking this question will also let them know you're smarter than the average bear). If they don't know what it is or say they don't use it, this doesn't mean they're bad designers. It DOES means they only know standard HTML (and maybe not even that), and stylistic changes and updates to your website are going to be time-consuming and problematic as time goes on.

• Tech Tip! Don't jump at fancy animation and other alternatives to standard HTML without considering the problems they introduce

  Website animation (such as Macromedia's Flash® plug in) and other alternatives to the traditional HTML method of delivering text and graphics are so common now that they are almost expected of commercial websites. But before you decide to go with any of these alternatives, consider these issues:

  • Do you really need it?

    Think of what purpose your website is to serve: providing the world with information about you. Your site of course needs to look professional and be easy to navigate, but beyond these requirements, is the added expense and inconvenience of alternatives to HTML really justified in your case?

    There's a definite coolness-factor to websites that use animation and other tricks. But at the end of the day, is anyone more likely to attend your concert or ask for a score of your piano trio because your website was cool? (Depending on your target audience, the answer to that question might very well be "yes". But if it isn't, spare yourself the expense and headache.)

  • Plug in required

    Any of the current forms of website animation or HTML-alternatives require a plug-in for your browser. Any browser that doesn't have the plug-in installed, or has an incompatible version of the plug-in, will not be able to display your website. Further, like any other software, HTML-alternatives are frequently updated, and so compatibility problems for your website will inevitably be introduced over time.

  • Slow and expensive updates

    If your website content, meaning the text in your website (such as your biography, list of repertoire, etc.) is displayed inside of an animated movie or other HTML-alternative, updates to your website will require a qualified technician to go into the original file, make the change, recompile the movie or HTML-alternative object, and upload it to your website.

  • Tech Tip! Content displayed in animated and other HTML-alternative objects cannot be indexed by search engines

    Search engines such as Google cannot index text compiled into HTML-alternatives, so your website will not show up in search results.

    Some designers will tell you that the solution to this is to keep separate HTML pages as well, that can be indexed by search engines. But this means that every update to your website must be done twice.

  • If you decide in favor of animation, instruct the designer to restrict its use to parts of the design that do not display content

    To be sure, animation can add interest to your site. But tell the designer to limit its use to parts of the site that do not display any dynamic content (which, for musicians, means just about everything). The animated header of the Wired Musician website, which uses Macromedia Flash®, is a good example.

    For another example of the effective use of Flash® only for visual interest, please visit www.scottstarrett.com. In this case a Flash® movie is also used in the navigation bar at the top of the page once you enter the site. In order to ensure that search engines are able to find all the pages, you'll see that the same navigation links are present at the bottom of each page in plain text.

• Once your designer starts showing you design concepts, respond with your feedback quickly and in objective tones

  You must understand that the design process does not move forward without your focussed involvement. Most designers, like musicians, are free-lancers, and their attention goes to where the income is. If a designer has sent you a design idea, you've got about 48 hours before your project gets moved to the bottom of the queue. If he doesn't hear from you during that time, and other clients are responding or offering new work, that's where his attention will go and you may find that a design process you had expected to take two weeks has now stretched to two months.

  Like musicians, designers are creative people whose egos bruise easily. Communicate any changes you would like to see in the design in a clear, objective and — as much as possible — positive language.

• Tech Tip! Ask the designer — or whoever is implementing your website — to include a Site Map

  If your website has a lot of pages and content, include a Site Map. This will also ensure that your website gets thoroughly indexed by search engines such as Google.

  A Site Map is simply a page that includes a link to every page on the website. Include a link to the Site Map itself at the bottom of every page or even in your navigation menu. In this way every page on your site can easily be found both by your visitors and search engines.

• Tech Tip! If your designer recommends a hosting company, "trust, but verify"

  If your designer will also be mastering your website, he might recommend a hosting service to you. This likely means that the designer is a reseller for hosting services with that company.

  A reseller is someone who buys blocks of website hosting time from a third-party hosting company, and then resells that time to clients like you, usually at a pretty modest markup. This is true of Wired Musician, as well.

  Ask the designer outright if this is the case. If it is, ask for the hosting company's name, explaining that you'd like to do a little research on them. Then go to a website like Developer's Dex (www.developersdex.com) and do a quick search on the name. You'll quickly find out what the real techies out there think of that company.

  If you're unhappy with what you learn about the company, explain to the designer what you found, and ask if he'd be willing to master your website with a different company. (You can also use Developer's Dex to find better alternatives.)

Some important gotchas:

• Keep your high-resolution photos on your website, but hide them

  Most musicians have high-resolution photos of themselves in a jpg format on their website. This eliminates the need to send these large files by E-mail, and makes them easily accessible to presenters who need them for programs and advertising.

  In general, however, you do not want the public and others who have no need for high-resolution photos of you to have access to them. Every time these large files are downloaded, they use up your website's bandwidth (many hosting services will charge for bandwidth “overages”).

  Further, keep in mind that the photographer owns the copyright to your photographs, you do not (unless the copyright has been explicitly signed over to you). If the photographer charges you a per-use fee on the photographs he takes, you could find yourself in some serious trouble by making these photos generally available over the internet.

  Further still, If you provide a link on your website to the high-resolution images, they will also show up in Google searches, which in this case is undesirable. (For an example, click here to see the image-search results for “Mozart”.)

  Instead, provide “thumbnails” or other smaller versions of these photos, with an E-mail link to you or your management. You can then respond to the E-mail with the correct URL to the desired photos.

• If you're including sound files (such as MP3s) on your website, make sure you've got the right to do so

  Composers in particular need to be careful about the sound files they put on their website for general access: remember that while you own the copyright to the work, the performer or ensemble owns the copyright to the performance. Get a release in writing (or at least in an E-mail) from any performers or ensembles whose recordings you want to put on your website. The language of the release should make it clear that the copyright owner understands that you are making this recording available for “public access over the internet” and that the owner regards this as “legitimate use”.

  Composers and performers need to protect their own copyrights from infringement by posting only excerpts of their recordings, and keeping the sound quality at a low enough level that stealing them becomes pointless. If you post high-quality MP3s or WAV files to your site, you run the risk of bootleggers copying and selling recordings of your music, most likely in some part of the world where they are well beyond the reach of copyright laws.

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