Professional Website Services
Website Design
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Before you buy website design services, you need to know what website design is and how it fits into all the other products and services you need to setup and run a website.
So what is website design?
Website design is a form of graphic design or media design. As such, like all other graphic / media design, the goal of website design is the effective visual presentation of information and ideas.
Graphic / media design of information for a website is called web design or website design.
Is website design the same as website development?
Web design (or website design) is commonly confused with web development (or website development). However, they are not the same.
Web development (or website development) is about programming (or developing) website software (or web applications), while web design is about creating effective visual presentation of information.
Web development services are provided by programmers or developers while web design services are provided by graphic designers.
What does it mean to buy website design?
When you buy website design, you are buying a service. As a service, it means you are paying someone, hopefully a professional graphic designer, to spend the time needed to work with you to complete your website design in the right graphic document formats.
The most important things to pay attention to when you buy website design service are
Can I create my website design myself?
Yes and No.
Yes, you can.
Technically speaking, anyone comfortable with using graphic design software can create website designs. These graphic design software comes in various forms, some you buy and install on your PC while others you pay a monthly fee to access and use online. Many more are free to download or use online. Any way you cut it, they all allow you to create the website design you want without paying a website designer to do it for you. All these tools either online or offline, are one form of Do-It-Yourself (DIY) solution.
No, you shouldn't.
The bottom line is DIY tools let you create a website design, not a good website design.
Why? Because a good design is not just about picking colors and graphics. It goes right back to the original goal of any form of design, i.e. the effective visual presentation of information and ideas.
What makes a website design good or effective are the very things that only graphic design professionals understand and are trained to do very well, such as:
However, the most important disadvantage to DIY users is the lack of knowledge and experience, in the creation, use and significance of standard graphic / media document formats. Simply put, a well executed website design will actually cost you less, not more.
By building your designs to industry standard graphic formats, you gain the benefits those standards are created for, i.e. to protect your investment in the design and assure your ability to reuse and integrate the design into new and future media design initiatives. All DIY tools marketed to design novices do not cater to these issues, hence inexperienced consumers are continually caught in a never ending vicious cycle of redesign after redesign. Learn more about design document formats >
Prebuilt website design templates? Custom website design?
The moniker "custom website design" is often used to describe the standard practice of hiring a graphic design professional to create a website design. This common practice introduces a new layer of unnecessary service description to novice design buyers, and a source of costly confusion. All good designs are inherently "custom" solutions.
Prebuilt website designs are built by independent design professionals to the right standard graphic documents format. These typically cost anywhere from $ 20 to $ 200 per design, and made available to novice design buyers looking to reduce their "custom design costs". Click here for prebuilt website design templates >
At first glance, these look cheap compared to paying $ 1000 or more for a "custom design". However if you look closely, you realize it's simply not this simple. This is because you cannot really use these prebuilt design documents without properly integrating your brand, logo, colors and message into the information architecture of the design. Doing so requires extensive customization by a graphics design professional, but when done properly, the product is indeed a "custom design".
The cost of customizing a prebuilt website design template effectively wipes out any perceived savings in using prebuilt website designs to begin with, and in many cases is more expensive. Not properly completing a brand integration and customization of a prebuilt design template results in a very bad design hack that effectively defeats the primary goals of design.
Bottom line is, prebuilt website designs are created to reduce the time, and hence cost, of creating an information architecture for the project; they are not a way to avoid the real creative design process. When used as such, the result is a website design that has already failed right out of the gate.
A clear understanding of industry standard graphic media document formats is key to a successful purchase of media design services, protecting your investment in the creation of your design documents, and assuring long-term return on investment (ROI) in the strategic use of those design assets.
At the end of every design project, the graphic design professional you work with should deliver your creative design documents to you in the right industry standard format. More often than not, many novice design service buyers do not know about these standards, and too many "design service providers" do not educate buyers on their significance and use in assuring ROI. Ultimately, in today's design services marketplace, it is the unfair responsibility of the design buyer to make sure that he/she gets the real value of the design service by demanding these standards from his/her design service provider.
All graphic documents are not created equal
A graphic document is not automatically a graphic design document.
Many common graphic (or picture) documents are routinely assumed by novice design buyers as graphic design documents. These include documents ending with these common picture file extensions:
.JPG
.PNG
.GIF
.BMP
While these are picture files, and hence by nature graphic documents, they are not graphic design documents. During the design process, your design service provider may provide these files as "mockups", so you can view the evolution of your design.
The following are examples of graphic design documents:
.AI
.PSD
.INDD
At the end of the design process, you should make sure that your graphic design documents are delivered to you. The design documents are used to create or modify the content of the design depending on how and where you want to use it in the future. These documents are usually large files, delivered in compressed archives (or zipped files) and should be carefully save on disk or CD for future design media integration needs. This is how your protect your investment in a creative design.
Many graphic design providers will point out that you cannot use these graphic design documents since you need graphic design software to view, or modify the content of the documents. This is a common reason for not delivering the documents in the first place. Most professional graphic design software is expensive and most people do not need it. You do not need to open or modify your graphic design documents, you just need to have them, since you paid to create them.
Graphic Design Document Formats
Graphic design documents are created using professional graphic design software. The ultimate creative design software package, used by design professionals to produce not only graphics content, but also audio, video & flash animations, and other print media, is the Adobe Creative Design Suite.
No matter what software is used to create your graphic design document, there are 2 standard graphic document formats that can be used.
Vector graphic document format
Vector graphic document format is a graphics document where the content of the design (i.e. shapes, colors, lines, etc) is created using mathematical equations.
Why is this important? Because by using mathematical equations, it means that you can make the content of the design as big or as small in size (or dimension, i.e. width x height) as you need, without losing any detail in quality (i.e. resolution). This means if you want to use the design on as small a media as a business card, or as large a media as a outdoor billboard, the quality of your design remains intact, i.e. you won't have to build your design all over again, just for that media.
Bottom line is: all brand identity design assets, including logos and corporate symbols should be completed in vector graphic document formats.
Raster graphic document format ( or Bitmap graphics)
Raster graphic document format is a graphics document where the content of the design is created using individual points (or pixels) of color. Raster graphics are also called bipmap graphics.
Raster graphics are the opposite of vector graphics because when you magnify raster graphics, you lose resolution, meaning the picture quality degrades. However, there are benefits to raster graphics, primarily, creation of more color range and shades that is richer than possible in vector graphics. This is ideal for photographic images, and high-end print publications like glossy magazine inserts, brochures, and so on.
Bottom line is: raster graphics are resolution dependent, and will not scale well if your resolution needs to change. Use raster graphics to produce media design document templates for specific media with clearly defined resolution requirements. For example, creating a print brochure design document to 300 dots per inch (or dpi) or a website design document template to 75 dpi. Since the target media requirements will not change, that design document will always work for just the target media to produce consistent high resolution and detail.
What does it mean to buy website design?
When you buy website design, you are buying a service.
As a service, it means you are paying someone, hopefully a professional graphic designer, to spend the time needed to work with you to complete your website design in the right graphic document formats.
The most important things to pay attention to when you buy website design service are
Flat-fee design services are the worst ways to buy creative design. With flat fee design services, you are basically assured that the design service provider will not spend enough time to understand and counsel you on long-term design strategy and implications. This works fine of course for these service providers since many novice design buyers seem to always think the solution to one in-effective design is another quick redesign!
Design Time & Total Cost
Apart from the obvious hourly rate paid for design service, the single reason for an expensive design is waste of time. Both the design service provider and the design service buyer can waste time during design process.
Good design is not necessarily expensive and should not necessarily take a long time. The easiest way to buy an expensive design is to waste time. The value of a design is not measured by how much is paid for it.
You can minimize the time spent on every design purchase by understanding the creative assets design building process, and making sure you have everything you need ready to deliver to your chosen design provider, in order to complete your creative design project.
Creative Assets Design Building Process
Using this process, every design document you buy makes it easier for you to complete your next design project and design documents. Easier means Faster. Faster means less time. Less time means less money.
Buying cost-effective website design service
Our website design service is designed to bring your design vision to reality in the least amount of time!
Design to industry standards.
We do not try to avoid the creative process, rather, we focus on optimizing the time it takes to create effective visual designs and deliver design documents to industry standards designed to protect your investment in creative design. Learn more about graphic document formats >
Pay only for what you need!
We don't assume that your design needs are the same as everybody else. We merely offer the technical expertise to bring your designs to life.
Affordable creative design rates.
At $ 50/hr, our creative design rates are very competitive and affordable. We believe in transparent pricing, so you can avoid unpleasant surprise billing.
Fair billing practices.
If you need more time to complete your creative design, simply pay for the additional time at the same low rate.
If you spend less time than you already paid for, use the remaining time for other services, or request a refund for the balance of the remaining time. Using our Project Management Console, you are always in control of your project and budget.
Our design process.
What is delivered to you.
At the end of the website design process, all design documents are delivered in Adobe Photoshop .PSD raster format created to 75 dpi resolution or more.
Your complete website design will include one primary website design template, and secondary design templates as needed. Secondary website design templates are variations of the primary design template for use on web pages requiring a different information architecture than the primary template.
What is needed to buy this service?
You need to have completed your brand media kit and will be required to provide your brand kit before we can start your website design process. At a minimum, you need to provide a logo design document.
What you need to buy this website design service!
You need to have completed your brand media kit and will be required to provide your brand kit before we can start your website design process. At a minimum, you need to provide a logo design document.
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15 E. Putnam Ave #236
Greenwich, CT 06830
Phone: (800) 548-9824
Fax: (866) 666-8673
  
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