What about a company's graphic design skills? Anybody with a Microsoft Front Page editor can hang out a shingle these days and say that they do web design. Most of the companies were started virtually yesterday, and wouldn't know how to do web design at all if you took away their Microsoft Front Page editor. Does the company you are considering really design, or do they use Microsoft Front Page templates and give you a rubber-stamped clone of a million-and-one other web designs? Graphics are the key to any great web design. Look for quality custom-made graphics which appear tailored to the company's clients. It's possible for unskilled "web designers" to purchase CD-ROMs full of web clip-art, but you don't want those on your web site since everyone else and his brother has them. Kids use them, but a business should not.

Besides being the crutch for a beginning web design firm, use of Microsoft Front Page editor leads to other problems with web designs. Most web editing software is biased toward the company's own browser product, and puts out code that either makes other browsers crash or limits what features they can see. Microsoft Front Page puts out pages that don't look right with any browser but Microsoft Internet Explorer. Netscape Composer Puts out pages that are incompatible with any browser but Netscape. Welcome to the browser wars! Your web design should be viewable from any platform and any browser, and it should look the same no matter which tool is used to view it. Since most web editors can't conform to these standards, we use a text-based editor. All pages are then viewed on multiple platforms to ensure readability.

Another reason that we choose not to use commercial web editors for our web designs is that they greatly increase the size of the pages they put out by inserting all sorts of unnecessary coding. This makes your web design download much more slowly, resulting in frustration for the end user. If you take a text-editor-created web design, load it into Microsoft Front Page and save it without even making any changes, the page will often increase to three or four times its original size!! We have seen how much more efficient our web design coding is -- in addition to being cross-platform!

Now that we've established that a good web design company is honest, experienced, skilled in graphic design and codes for efficiency and cross-platform visibility, what else should you look for?

Look for a company that has proven programming skills to fill your web site development needs. Although today you may only need a feedback form and script for your web design, you may decide to add a database or other complex features tomorrow. Will the company you chose be able to grow with you as your web site development needs change? Web design is one thing, but web programming is quite another. Generally, "web designers" who call themselves such because they downloaded a free copy of Microsoft Front Page know next to nothing about custom programming and database normalization. Sure, they may be able to provide you with a canned script that they downloaded from some free site, but ask them to modify it or create something from scratch and they will not be able to. PCSI's lead programmer has over 18 years of software engineering and database design experience to aid you in making your web design as functional as it is beautiful.

What other things should a web design firm offer you? They should be able to provide you with a web hosting plan that is right for you. PCSI not only has the web design and web site development skills, but we can offer you web hosting at a rate that is much lower than many other ISPs can offer. In fact, if your web design qualifies, we will even throw in one year of hosting for free! (See our hosting and free hosting pages for details.) You just can't beat a package deal like that! Some ISPs offer you free web design with your hosting, and then they assign your web design to an 18-year-old kid in tech support who knows nothing about graphic design and ends up scaring your customers away with an ugly site. We believe that deals like that are the opposite of what they should be. Shouldn't you be buying the web design and getting the hosting for free instead so that you end up with the highest quality design and a site that you will be proud of? We think so! After all, it's the web design that attracts your customers or turns them away.

Finally, let's discuss web design costs. We bill by the hour at very reasonable rates. We can look at your material and give you a firm estimate for building a quality web design at a very affordable price. Web site development costs need not be prohibitively expensive, yet we have seen some of our competitors charging as much as $100 per page!! If you see anything like that, run the other way as fast as you can! You should be paying for the web design and not by the page. Adding extra pages once the web design is completed should not cost more than 1/6 of their hourly rate (10 minutes) per page unless the page is extremely complex. In some instances, PCSI has been able to add extra pages for as little as $4 each!

Speaking of coding pages quickly and cheaply in your web design process, our programming skills have allowed us to generate literally hundreds of pages in less than 60 seconds!! How do we type so fast? When each page is identical except for changing data, we can use a database to automate the page production phase of your web site development. To see the result of this kind of programming, take a look at what we did for Select Sires, a leader in dairy cow genetics. Click here to see automatically generated indexes that will lead you to hundreds of individual dairy cow pages that were generated automatically in less than a minute. Incidentally, we were even able to code the bar graphs at the bottom automatically by using math formulas to calculate the size of the bar colorations! This saved the company literally thousands of dollars.