Finding a Reliable Web Designer

Building a Cartoon Entertainment Website for Fun and Profit

Part Two — Building a Cartoon Entertainment Website (cont.)

Finding a Reliable Web Designer

Then someone highly recommended a website called www.w3schools.com that maintains free tutorials on how to build websites, written for beginners. The building of a website mainly involves learning something called the “HTML” code, which basically tells a computer how to arrange a bunch of image fragments into a coherent composite, to form a web page. I was told that this is the best and most fundamental way to learn how to build a website, and that it is not difficult to learn. I began to seriously consider this route, and started studying, but then the instructions for practicing the lessons required resetting several of the basic functions of my computer, and I was afraid to mess with that.

So then I did a search on Amazon and found some books titled “Web Design for Dummies” and variations of that title. These books included chapters on building websites, but the Amazon readers’ comments expressed disappointment in the books for leaving out most of the actual beginner’s steps, being written instead for highly knowledgeable people who want to learn to become professional builders for corporate clients.

Finally I stepped back into earlier technology and looked in a couple of current telephone Yellow Pages for Los Angeles — but found no listings for website builders — which seemed bizarre. How could that be?? Telephone books are now becoming a thing of the past, and these days there are companies publishing and distributing bogus telephone books that are very incomplete. The bogus publishers use deliberately misleading names like Yellowbook and AT&T Companion. I later discovered the legitimate telephone book for my area, which listed under “Website Builders” several businesses in Los Angeles that build websites.

Now a whole new assortment of pitfalls begins. Some companies that offer to build websites are quite large and are intended to service the big corporations; they charge outrageously high prices to support the salaries of their own tiers of executives and an overpaid C.E.O. Then there are smaller companies whose prices are more reasonable, but while they promise to build your website in a certain time frame, they will actually leave your work on the shelf indefinitely if a big company throws more money at them to upgrade its website instead. And then there are the individuals who basically work in their garages — and while they will assure you that they know how to build websites, most of them actually do not. Instead, all they know how to do is to take a few common off-the-shelf web design templates and attempt to shoehorn your needs into those templates. Anything beyond that will leave them utterly clueless.


 

 

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