I’m often asked the question by my clients – “Where can I find stock photos?”. There are a number of sites across the web offering stock photos. There are two main types of stock photo – Royality Free (unlicensed) and Rights Managed (licensed).

Below is a number of websites were you can find a number of categories of stock photos:

1. stock.xchng
2. Freerange Stock
3. Morguefile
4. Pixel Perfect Digital
5. Free Media Goo
6. openphoto.net
7. Flickr
8. Stockvault
9. NASA
10. deviantARTs Stock Images section
11. Everystockphoto
12. Creative Commons Search
13. Dreamstimes Free Section
14. Fotolias Free Section
15. iStockphotos Free Images

1. Know Your Website Purpose

This is probably the most important step. Everything else leads back to your website’s purpose and goals. Your website goals could include anything from converting visitors to members, informing existing members of latest news, building your email newsletter, building awareness, and collecting donations.

2. Make it Easy to Use

Everyone appreciates a website that is easy to use. The layout design should be consistent throughout the site, the menu should be easy to use, the text easy to read, and links easy to identify.

3. How to Get Involved

Let visitors know how they can become involved. Donating money is one way, but you should also suggest other ways they can get involved.

4. Accept Donations / Subscriptions

You should have a donation or subscriptions button that is obvious and easy to find. Accepting online credit card donations is easier than you may think. Including a funding goal is also a good idea.  This let’s members and visitors feel part of achieving a common goal.

5. Keep in Touch

Allow your visitors to easily stay in touch with what you are doing. Provide an email newsletter sign up box, and have links to your Twitter and Facebook pages.

6. Use Video

Video is the way of the future. It doesn’t need to be fancy, most digital cameras can now take video. As well as using the video clip on your own website, upload it to YouTube and other video sharing sites to gain leverage.

7. Contact Information

Make it easy for visitors to find your contact details. Don’t just have a contact page, but also include your contact details in a side-block or in your site’s footer.

8. Ongoing Maintenance

Use a Content Management System (CMS), so you can edit your website yourself. This will allow you to keep your website up-to-date and relevant.  One such CMS framework is Joomla.  This framework is extremely powerful and can be easily extended to grow as your website does.

9. Write for Search

Search engines such as Google, Yahoo and Bing only read text. They read all the text on your website, so give some thought to write the words that people are searching for.  And, were you are using images, ensure you have included alternative text tags (Alt Tags) to allow the search engines to understand your content better.

10. Measure the Results

Use Google Analytics to track how visitors find your website, and what they are looking at. Otherwise it’s difficult to measure how well your website is achieving its goals.

Chocolate Lime provide affordable web sites, ecommerce / online shops, content management / database websites, chat forums, web hosting, design and development. While our prices may be cheap, the quality of our design, hosting and customer service is second to none. We provide exceptional value for money when compared to our competitors.

We are currently offering businesses a simple 1 page website for just £150 including free hosting for 1 year and site submission to the major search engines fully optimised. So, whether your looking to simply get your contact details online, advertise your services or just let the world know who you are – let Chocolate Lime create you a professional website design that’ll help market and promote your business or organisation.

In order to achieve the best results for any given project, it’s imperative that a well structured ‘Design Brief’ is supplied, proving beneficial to both the client and designer.

Give any designer free reign to create you an image, a logo, a corporate identity, a company website and you are overlooking the importance of the output reflecting your needs and wants as a client. An effective design brief is the first and single most critical factor in ensuring that any design project is successful.

What is a Design Brief?

A well structured, informative design brief ensures that both parties are of an understanding as to what is required, eliminating any confusion throughout the whole design process. However, through experience, even those clients who would much rather prefer leaving everything up to the designer with very limited background information other than ie. “I’m not sure what I want, can you not just create something and we’ll see if I like it at the end” or my favourite” I just want it to look nice”, really ‘DO’ have a subconscious vision as to what they want – whether they know it or not. Perhaps it’s the thought of tackling something they’re unsure about. Listed below are some pointers to think about prior to designers starting a project.

• The background of the company, what you do and more importantly, what you are trying to achieve with the project
• Who is the target audience?
• Are there any specific guidelines, for example, fonts and colours to be used
• What sort of look they want – traditional, contemporary, artistic, fun and such like
• What’s the budget?

From a design perspective, a little thought at the outset goes a long way….ensuring the resulting design reflects the conscious (or subconscious!) vision.

One of the most common questions I’m asked by potential clients when enquiring about web design services, is ‘what’s the difference between a static site and content managed site?’

In short, nothing really to the visitors of the site. However, there is a big difference the owner of the site.

Both types of website style, provide the same function – they sell your business services / products. Regardless of whether a client chooses a simple brochure website design or a full e-commerce solution, the look and feel of the site requires the same level of design effort.

What makes the content managed site more costly up front, is the installation, configuration and set-up time. Not to mention the additional time required for training clients in how to maintain their new toy!

A static website (or brochure website) will have fixed content. This content is created at the time of the design process, and as the site goes live – the content is fixed. One advantage of static website design is that every page can be different if desired, to match the layout to different content, and the designer is free to put in any special effects that a client may ask for in a unique way on different pages. The main disadvantage is scalability – any new pages need to be created from scratch, by the owner of the site or, by the design company (normally at a cost).

A content managed website design allows clients to manage their own website content, add new content and take full ownership of what does into their website. An example of a content managed system is the Open Source framework – Joomla. This a modular based framework which means scalability is simple. There are many components and modules available to be used with a Joomla content managed site, and this allows for greater functionality to client’s websites. Content managed websites usually are themed. This means that throughout the site there is a common look and feel. Further design work is required to create additional themes, should a client want a different look across some of their content. Although the cost is generally higher for a content managed solution, the ongoing costs associated with maintenance, updates etc. are greatly reduced due to the fact clients control the content themselves via administrator pages.

In summary, if your looking for a simple website that advertises you on the web and allows your potential customers to view a bit about you and contact you – then a static site is probably the way to go. If you’re looking to add content i.e. blog or latest news, sell products, update exisiting services or galleries, or even just keep on top of your Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) – then a content managed website is something for you to consider.

Chocolate Lime offer both Static and a Content Managed Website Design Service