How Does One
Create a Website?

Atlanta's NFI has designed web sites since 1999. By now we have built about 70 websites in Atlanta and elsewhere reaching across the country and now also several countries outside of the United States such as Thibault Villa. We have also provided strategic marketing services for existing websites, helping those clients get many more visitors to their sites through campaigns involving Search Engine Optimization and/or Sponsored Linking or Sponsored Marketing (often referred to as "Pay per Click Marketing".

NFI provides strategic concepting (understanding weaknesses and strengths of any current site you have), competitive analysis, web development, eCommerce, graphic design, domain procurement, eCommerce, on-going mainteance, database construction and database integration, Search Engine Optimization and Sponsored Marketing. We're also an Earthlink Value Added Reseller and can set you up on Earthlink hosting and even save you money there.

Our general web site development philosophy is focused on building professional web sites that are attractive, and that will be visited by the general public. So we also focus on Domain Aquisition, Domain Forwarding, Sponsored Marketing, Search Engine Optimization and site metric analysis to get your web site the visibility you need.

Generating traffic is only part of the formula to a great web site. The other part is encouraging calls to action. And to do that, we will help to make your web site content compelling: we help you tell your story - not just the way your brochures do, but the way that reads the best on the web.

Our web design tagline is "Be online all the time." What this means is that we endeavor to help our clients not only have attractive websites but to make their sites visible. A visible website will bring more visitors than an attractive one that doesn't have a strategic marketing campaign behind it. It's important to keep design and implementation and maintenance on one hand balanced with search engine optimization and sponsored marketing on the other when creating a website budget. There is no hard rule of thumb, but chances are you will spend much more on the marketing of your website then the actual construction of it.

A successful web site is a primary source of information for clients, prospective customers and employees. If you are going to build a website, then think about things such as your intended audience, the goals you want to accomplish with the site and where you would like the site to be in 2 to 5 years. Do you want for it to help you establish credibility or bring new leads or to close business? Should it be warm and inviting or conservative and reserved or somewhere in between?

Is the content writen from the perspective of what you want to say or what prospective customers want to read? It's what the User wants to read that counts. Most people write about what they want to say without considering whether or not they have addressed what prospective clients wish to read. And yet in many ways, the end result of each website should be: "how can we help you solve your problems or meet your needs?" If you aren't asking that question either implicitly or explicitly, then you are probably missing the mark.

As part of any website design campaign, we will guide you through questions such as those that are above and quite a few more so that we can help you achieve the desired end results. The main steps to develop a website are as follows:

Strategic Planning - creating a comprehensive long-term plan for maximizing traffic and visitors and thus sales
Content Management - converting existing print media for the web and adding other content as needed
Interface Design - maximizing the impact of your website with an emphasis on usability
Programming - creation of site using CSS and other advanced methods
On Going Maintenance - strategic and tactical methods for making enhancements to your website over the short term

Strategic Planning

Before any designing or programming takes place, NFI meets with you to develop a strategic plan unique to your organization and its needs.

We focus on:

Your audience and what appeals to them
Letting prospects pre-qualify themselves if you are worried about too many leads
Which domain should you buy - if you don't already have one?
Which other domains should you buy to protect yourself and to gain more traffic?
What kind of hosting package should you purchase?
Your goals for the site and how they can be accomplished
Your marketing information and how it can be applied to the web

We then bring that plan to life within the context of any existing parts of your website in addition to anything that is added during the creative process.

Content Writing

Content Writing is the unique process of writing web content specifically geared towards a web audience. Many people build out their websites by simply taking content from brochures and converting it to HTML. But for better results, one should write the content specifically for the internet.

If your company is launching a full-scale marketing campaign, from direct mail to online promotions, it is unlikely that you will use the same content for both since your online audience has a very different way of reading and processing information on the web than they would sitting at the office with a brochure in hand. Research shows that most people do not read web pages. They scan. Thus it is necessary to provide concise, relevant and credible information in an easy-to-read format. Eyestrain and attention spans have to be considered. For instance, white text on a black background works great in print, but may lead to eye strain on the web. We will organize your content for the optimal paragraph length and line width.

Additionally, content writing is an important component of Search Engine Optimization to get top rankings for your site.

Interface Design

Interface Design is the art of making your site User Friendly. The paradigm of the Home Page being THE landing page is out. Almost any page on your site can turn into a landing page. We will tell you how that affects the User experience...

A well designed site encourages Users to visit longer, read content more intently, and return time and again. Through dynamic design, we organize your content so that it will be aesthetically pleasing and provide intuitive site navigation. NFI takes the information architecture and creates an interface design that effectively expresses your organization's goals and image.

We also pay attention to Usability, color psychology, images selected and calls to action. Our philosophy is that we wish to help you maximize the number of prospective clients who pick up the phone or shoot you an e-mail so that you know that they are out there visiting your site and, more importanty, to add great revenues to your bottom line.

It is very important to keep an eye on your website's site statistics. These will give you invaluable guidance and feedback on what is working and what is not. With stastical packages such as Urchin (which we provide with our Earthlink hosting), you can track all kinds of metrics including the average duration of a visit, which pages are visited most often, which ones are the pages left most often, peak visitation by hour, day, week, month, year or all time. You can see how many visitors never get beyond just one page on your site and then correct the problems, if any, so that the User retention rate increases.

Programming

Our programmers integrate the above elements and seamlessly turn them into a full function web site. We specialize in maximizing the advantages of the web - using client side programming and back end databases that increase web site usability.

NFI's programming services include:

E-commerce
Online applications that streamline your organization's day-to-day processes
Online forms that reduce paperwork and speed processing
Online job applications or job/resume database
Online company directory (names, phone number, email, department, titles, supervisors etc.)

Web technology has changed dramatically since 1999 when NFI originally started developing web sites. Here are some of the objectives that we try to attain with all of our clients for their new sites or when redesigning their existing web sites. With the new sites that we have been developing recently, we have kept our designs at the forefront by meeting the following, per your wishes:

Load ALL menus and submenus in 1 to 3 seconds
One or two click access to entire site (except password-protected area requires login)
Redesign navigation so that it is all menu driven (instead of top and side navigation)
CSS for styles
CSS for layout
Simplify page length
Standardize font sizes, etc.
Redesign look and feel of site
Modularize site by use of style sheets and include files and ASP
Decrease load times of each page by approximately 75%
Improve cross-browser compatibility
Improve multi-resolution compatibility
Register and promote the web site on a weekly basis
Valid HTML code for next generation web compatibility
Code is very modular, should be easy to add to and modify site wide changes
Site is cross-browser, cross-platform compatible
Easy to use and familiar "Windows Toolbar" navigation metaphor
Advanced security capability
Section 508 Compliance

Optional:

Redesign logo
Include professional quality images

On-Going Maintenance

Once your site is in production, it is important to keep it vibrant and living. More content is good for Search Engines. But it's also simply helpful to users to keep them coming back again and again and to help them spread the word about what you do. We will help you put together a long-term maintenance plan so that we can either make ad hoc changes for you or create an affordable monthly maintenance contract.

Remember...

Count on NFI to transform your presence on the World Wide Web. A great web site is your first point of contact for the prospects you didn't know existed. A well-developed web site is a formidable tool which reaps great long-term benefits and generally has an outstanding return on investment.

Your web site works for you 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days of the year not just at your office, but across the entire world. It's like having a world-wide sales force that never sleeps. Compare the cost of maintaining one sales person to a web site over a year, and the relative worth becomes clear.

NFI will not only develop your web site concept for you, but also help you in deciding which content to use, and then integrate your content for you. We maintain your web site as often as you need for us to with stand-by Priority Service. We provide you with statistics to help you analyze your web traffic. Now you can know which search engines and other web sites are providing you with the most leads. NFI can also help you find creative ways to promote your web site so that you get the web-traffic you need.

Whew. You made it. In spite of what we wrote above, this is a long page by web standards. Of course, not everyone skips the longer pages. Thank you for reading this far. Should you have any questions or need any help, then call us at 770-850-1640. (See, here is that call to action we wrote about above.) We're a very friendly group of web developers and we pride ourselves on helping people in Atlanta and across the world solve their website needs and delivering a great bang for their budgetary buck.

Be online all the time. With NFI.