Welcome to Crittersoup.com

Features of a Website

This is basically Step 2 of the Planning stage. Listed below are a few of the common features that clients request from me. When discussing a site with a Web Designer, make sure you understand the exact features that you want as well as the functionality (what it is supposed to do). If you need to get more acquinted with the terminology, visit my Glossary page.

1. Drop Down Menus: These look great and can hold a lot of content. But, some search engines have a difficult time interpreting them. You want to drive traffic to your site, not keep it from coming. So, if you must use a drop down menu, then consider having links off to the sides of the page as well.

2. Flash or no Flash? Well, I think it depends on the target audience. For example, if I were a realtor, selling homes that cost $5 million or more, then I bet the audience, viewer, will have a high-speed connection and the page would load quickly for them. If I were selling homes in a very rural area where most of the viewers are on dial-up, then I might not use Flash. The longer the page takes to load, the greater the chance that a viewer will leave your site!

3. Frames or no Frames? Just stay away from them! That's all you need to know.

4. What if I have lots of products? If you are just displaying information and you have 10 pages or so, then you won't need a database. If you have lots of products for sale, like a realtor, you will probably need a database to keep track of all of the items as well as to use for creating the pages. Here's an example, you are the realtor, I am the designer, and you want a site. You have 50 homes for sale. Now, you say you don't want a database. Well, then you need to have at least 1 page created per home. That's 50 pages! If I use a database to hold the information on the homes for sale, then I only have to create 1 page that is connected to the database, and depending on which home the customer clicked on, that would be the information that is displayed. With a database, I could add 100 more homes for sale easily and not have to touch the web pages at all! The web pages grow with the database. Some minor tweaking may be involved, but not as much tweaking as it would take for me to create 100 more pages!

5. Look around ... Go visit the competition! What type of functionality do they have that interests you? What are the things about your competitions website that annoy you?

Now what do I do?

Now that you have decided on a Domain name, Hosting company, and features, you need to make a choice: Do you Build it Yourself or Find a Designer?