Creating a website

As a fashion designer, it’s a good idea to have a web page for your label. It shows you are professional, serious and makes your contact details available for potential stockists who may hear of your label and search for you on line.  A simple website with your contact details, some information about your label and some good quality pictures of your previous work is all you need to get started.

There is a whole world of information on this topic, and I won’t try and pretend I’m an expert. But I can tell you about my website, and the process I went through getting it up and running, so perhaps that will be of some use to those of you trying to start your own!

The first thing I did was grab a piece of paper and sketch out what I wanted the website to have. What pages it needed, what linked where, what I needed on the menu bar. That was my site map.

Then I did a heap of research – mainly just visiting other sites and noting what I liked and didn’t like. I realised that ease of navigation and fast loading speeds were so important – more important to me than flashy graphics and interactive thingamajigs. But that’s just me. The point of doing this research is to sort out what you like, and get inspiration.

I adjusted my site map to reflect what I had learnt from my research, and then came the hard part – finding a web site designer.

Googling ‘web site designer’ was the obvious place to start. I also looked at the sites I liked and down the bottom there was usually a link to their site designer. I requested a bunch of quotes and went from there.

In the end, I chose a web site designer called ‘Have A Look’ web design. I chose them for two reasons – one being that they weren’t too expensive, and also they were very patient with all my enquiries and happy to help with anything I needed. Good service goes a very long way in my books.

It’s always hard when you have such a clear idea of how you want something to look and you have to hand it over to someone else. But Have A Look were great (I’m really happy with my site) and the best part was they had the site done in a week.  Since then I have needed tech support a couple of times and every time they have been very accommodating and happy to help.

Things to note

• Make sure your site is self-updatable. This means you can make changes to the content whenever you like. If you don’t have this ability, then every time you want to make an update you’ll have to pay the web designer to do it.
• Make sure to communicate with your web design agency and tell them what you want for your site - for example you might really want quick page loading, a particular colour background and contact details on every page.  They won’t know what you consider important unless you tell them.
• That being said… they do need a bit of creative license. So find someone you can trust, tell them what you want and then let them do what they do best.
• Do register your domain name as soon as possible. Those things go fast! And get as many versions as you can afford… the .com, the .com.au, the .net.au, etc. They’re not too expensive. If you don’t secure these, you run the risk of someone else taking them and stealing your audience.

If you have any tips for first timers getting a website designed, please share them with us and post a comment!

www.havealook.com.au