Websites

The creation and design of a website involves many steps. Super-simplified, they are:

• Domain Registration
• Web Hosting
• Web Design

As you decide on which path to choose for your website, you’ll want to consider how much goes into designing one. Here are some questions to ask yourself:

• Do I want to do my own updates?
• Do I need a shopping cart program?
• Do I have a logo that will work for a website?
• Do I want to have a blog on my website?
• Do I already have a domain name?
• Do I have photos and art for my site? Do I have written permission to use these materials?

CJ Creative Design, LLC can help you design or update your website a number of different ways.

• Create an entirely new site.
• Update your existing site.
• Set up a WordPress site for you to update on your own. We can train you how to do those updates.

Domain Registration

Ideally, you want a top-level domain (TLD) name that relates to your content (ie. yoursite.com)

There are many choices available, but you don’t want something that can easily be confused with another website or product. You also don’t want it to remind you of anything that could negatively impact your message or brand.

Do a little market research. It doesn’t have to be ultra technical unless you want it to be. Ask others around you, “Whats the first thing that comes to mind when you hear (your potential domain name)?” Listen to their responses. It may save you from heartburn later.

In addition, you may want to register other similar top-level domains to point to your site. For example, it would be a good idea to register yoursite.com, yoursite.info and yoursite.biz as the number of websites increases every year. All of them can point to your site at yoursite.com. If a customer types in yoursite.biz, he would still arrive at your website.

Doing so can also prevent confusion down the road. You wouldn’t want your competitor to have the same name in front of the dot, and divert your traffic to his site.

See if the domain you want is available, or contact us. We’d love to help you choose domains that best fit your site’s content.

.com |  .net  |  .org  |  .info  |  .us  |  .name  |  .biz  |  .cc  |  .tv  |  .ws  |  .mobi

Web Hosting

Where will your website be stored? We are happy to set that up for you.

We’ll help you get started and take care of the administrative aspects of your website: login and FTP client accounts, database creation, email address set-up, and billing. We can help you determine the type of hosting package that you need. There are many options available, such as: Which platform should you use? (Linux or Windows) Which kind of shopping cart program do I need? Are there any server-side programs needed? Let’s talk about what you really need before jumping into a hosting contract.

Web Design

There is a lot of work that goes into creating a website. In some ways, each page of a website is like creating a mosaic. Imagine your website is a mosaic:

Let’s say you’re ready to glue the different bits and pieces together to make your mosaic. All these pieces need to be made just the right size before you can put them into place. What if the artist tried to put a full-size red brick in place of a red piece somewhere in the above pictured mosaic? It wouldn’t look right, even if you moved some of the pieces around to make room for it. It would be unbalanced, and most people would not stop to admire such a mosaic.

If your website pieces (photographs, graphics, text) are the wrong visual size, the resulting web page would be unbalanced. If the file size is too large for one of the components, it probably won’t appear at the same time the rest of the web page, (it may take too long to load), allowing a visual hole in your web page, just as if someone had pried out several of the blue pieces in the pictured mosaic. It wouldn’t be as beautiful, because pieces would be missing.

What does CJ Creative Design do?

At CJ Creative Design, LLC, we make sure that each portion of the page is created, sized, and fit together to give it the best possible look: headers and logos, images and text.

On most business web pages, you’ll see a header with the company logo. Logos help customers identify your company by sight. In marketing terms, it’s called brand recognition. When used on a website, a header is the graphic at the top of the page where the company logo is added to artwork and/or photos and some text that convey a more detailed company image.

Will images need to be created, or photos taken? Many times, art work needs to be tweaked to tie in necessary colors. Graphics and other components of the website are optimized to load as quickly as possible, while retaining image integrity.

Text styles need to be determined. Headings, paragraphs, italics, outlines, text boxes… You need your website viewers to be able to get the information they want – We format the text so that your site visitors can do just that.

What fonts would work best for your website? Different fonts convey different thoughts and feelings. This may effect the message you want to send to your website viewers and clients.

Page titles and keywords need to be determined for search engine optimization and inserted into the coding of the web pages.

WordPress

WordPress is an open source content management system, which is usually used for blogging, but also works well for other kinds of websites.

If you are a do-it-yourself type person, we can set up a website for you using WordPress, and you can easily update the text on your own. We will be happy to train you how to do those updates.

More Information

Visit our FAQ and terminology pages for more information on websites and other design information. To see a few of the sites we’ve designed, visit our Portfolio.