Thursday, December 30, 2010

Custom Web Design Toronto: Why We Compromise to Design Our Website

The importance of a well-designed website is not something that needs any further explanation or persuasion. Organizations across the world have very well understood the significance and relevance of an attractive and efficient website. In this era of internet marketing, a website is like another showroom, outlet, branch office or services center of the company, although online. In fact, it must be considered as the first and one of the most frequent interfaces of the company with the client. They serve multiple purposes including but not limited to promoting the company, advertising about new products and educating the clients about the organization and its products and services. With the increasing affordability and easy availability of internet to large masses, electronic commerce is leading the marketing practice.

A vast majority of consumers agree that they have never had a human interface with many of their online service providers despite using them for a considerably long period. Needless to say, that every organization should invest significant time and money to get the best of the design for their website. Companies like custom Web Design Toronto, specialize in creating beautiful, functional, user friendly and lead generating Toronto based websites. Any kind of compromise in website design may lead to very damaging consequence in future.

Any organization would certainly do a cost – benefit analysis before deciding their budget for the website design but it would be extremely foolish to just look at the immediate returns from the money spent on the website design and as such keep on curtaining the budget for the same. The return on investment (popularly known as ROI in the financial parlance) for website design mostly take into account the short term as well as long term benefits. It is true that it is very difficult to measure the exact quantum of the real benefit that an organization has achieved due to better website design. Hence, the justification to why we compromise to design our website can always be provided.

More and more organizations have started to realize that money spent on the website is not wasted but invested. But the sad reality of life it that most of the business organizations still see the website design as a cost center and do not want to pay the premium for a better, user – friendly and efficient website. Corporate client are generally driven by their out dated annual / quarterly budgets and do not want to exceed. Not realizing the fact that any decision related to the website design can have far-reaching consequences on the profitability and reputation of the company. For example, on 14 July 2010, BBC World had launched the redesigned version of its website. To their utter surprises, it received more than 500 comments from various users in less than 6 hours of its launch and a vast majority (around 75%) of the comments said that they hated the new look which was confusing and did not at all appear to be user friendly. Many users requested BCC to get back to the old version. So it’s better to get your website designed without any compromise.

Thursday, December 16, 2010

Website Design Toronto: Quality and Money both Matter a lot

Today everyone wants to get information as fast as possible. People’s first choice is to search for things required on the internet. Each company whether big or small wants to have their own website so that they don’t miss on their customers. Also it is one of the easiest ways to become easily accessible by those who are in need of the product or service. However, designing a website is not an easy task. Companies like website design Toronto makes the job easy. Then comes the question of how much money to be spent and what is the quality required?

It is always a tough task to figure out the right balance between quality and money when you are procuring a business service like website design. The businesses today are under severe pressure from the shareholders to generate higher and higher returns on quarterly/annual basis, which means one has be extremely careful in being able to negotiate rock bottom rates when negotiating to procure any service. Similarly, in this world of cut-throat competition, one has to ensure that your website makes a mark in the mind of customers immediately and gets a place registered in their brain, which means the quality of the website design has to be of an absolutely high order. The money spent on website design is not wasted but invested, and can have long lasting impact on the progress of business if the correct balance of quality and money is achieved.

“Quality comes at a price”, very rightly said but the fact of the business is that most corporate customers are obsessed with procuring the design services at the cheapest possible rates. Not realizing that website design is a creative area of work and they may not get the best of the design if they are not prepared to pay the premium. However, corporate clients must always ensure that they get their value for the money spent and as such must negotiate service charges to the best of their ability.

The clients should also be extremely careful that some options may apparently seem cheaper but may not actually be so. For ex: Consider a business, where a lot of transactions happen online, like banks, financial institutions, ticket reservations etc. Such a business would require very robust system and web design. However, if enough time and money is not invested initially to ensure a high quality and efficient website, the client might be forced to either modify or completely revamp the website all together. Therefore, a lot of focus has to be paid on the quality at the time of designing websites for such businesses.

On a different note, let us discuss another example. Consider a business, which is very dynamic and where trends change very frequently like apparels, electronic gadgets etc. customers in this category prefer and enjoy frequent changes in website design and appearance. Such a website would require a lot of freshness and novelty to attract new customers. This is one cases where the business can not afford to spent a million every time they go for a change as such money has to be the focus while designing such websites.