A couple of months ago I read the following article over at Smashing Magazine which I had to agree with wholeheartedly. At a company where I previously worked design was expected to be pulled out of my ass with no time to think about it (and given crappy photos to work with), or I was sent links to templates over at Template Monster.

I will say there are at least two websites that I did that I absolutely hate!! And still hate! Shudder!!!!

It takes time and careful thought for good to great web design and development. We all notice the notice the design, but are completely unaware of the development aspect. The development should always take into consideration:

• the where do I want to go or be in the future with this site
• have you thought about this
• the “no” to that is so not a good idea and this is why

There are potential clients that do not seem to understand the amount of work that goes into preparing a proposal and it’s even harder when they don’t respond to specific question, and then creating the design.

I want you to have a great website that can grow as your business grows without growing pains. I don’t want you to have to switch platforms, applications, etc.

Examples of growing pains would be:

Creating a website on a Linux server using a PHP/MySQL application, and in the future you want to add a feature that requires Windows (ASP.NET/SQL Server) to run and under the same domain name.

Building a static site (HTML/XHTML) and you decide you want interactivity so now the site has to be redone in either PHP/MySQL or ASP.NET/SQL Server. JavaScript is nice and so is AJAX (ohh, I just love what AJAX can do), but if JavaScript is turned off in a visitor’s browser they aren’t going to see the feature that was added.

I could so go on and on about this topic.