Website design is a little different than website development. Design has to do with choosing
an appearance theme, defining the business requirements, choosing a hosting company, choosing a domain name,
etc. A successful designer need not be a good programmer although it helps. CIT services is a
full-service website design and development company. We do:
- Domain Registration. Your domain is your www address, for example http://www.cit-services.com. You
can register your domain yourself but if you do so, be sure to renew your registration or you will lose your
domain and not be able to get it back. Losing a good domain can be a disaster as all the good work you have
done to tell your customers about your website and to tell Google, etc. about your website is lost forever.
We can take care of this for you if you prefer. We like GoDaddy.
- Hosting. The files in your website have to reside on a server somewhere. You can put them
on your own server (expensive and usually slow), on a national service such as GoDaddy or on our
servers. We normally bundle hosting with a maintenance contract, both of which are free the first year.
Hosting is an issue because we require a Windows Server as Linux servers do not support ASP.NET or MS SQL Server.
Not all of our websites have a SQL Server back-end but all of our websites require ASP.NET. We see no
reason to go the cheap route to $5.00 a month hosting and to make development more difficult and less secure.
Our servers are a good choice if you need a database back-end or if you intend to put video on your website as we do not limit the
amount of data that can be sent every month.
- Appearance Design. Normally this is choosing a template which we will heavily modify. We
can also design a logo for you or match your website's appearance to existing company stationary or business
cards.
- Purpose. An eCommerce website will be designed very differently than
a promotional website or a scheduling website. A database is almost always required.
- Functional Design. This task involves how you want your website organized. How many
pages, what the menu should look like and whether you need a database back-end. If you need a database, what data
you need and the relationships among your data determine how we will design your database. It is called Relational Modeling.
- Search Engine Design. Not every website needs to be designed for Search Engine Optimization, but
if you want strangers to visit your website and you are not always going to tell them about your website (for example with a newspaper
advertisement) then the website needs to be designed for your prospective customers. Creating a website and then going back and
optimizing it for Google is a bad idea.
- Mobile Design. Increasingly, website visitors are on a mobile device. This is
significant for 2 reasons.
#1 Google will not rank a website highly if a search is performed from a mobile device and the websit is not
mobile friendly. This website is, you can test it at
Google PageSpeed.
#2 A website should be attractive and informative for website visitors on a mobile device. Often a website should contain much less information
when viewed on a mobile device than when viewed on a standard computer.