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The Internet is a virtual environment. Every single thing you see is non-tangible. Your visitors cannot actually hold your product or service in their hands. They cannot feel it, smell it, taste it or hear it. You can only work within a limited environment; the Internet. So how do you sell a product or service you offer if your visitors can only see it in this virtual environment?
You simply work with what you have and make it better than your competitor's.
Almost all web sites are stores or offices that have been placed online. If you have a store or office, it needs to be "translated" into a virtual environment. Unfortunately, this is where many companies or private owners make their biggest mistake. It's the actual process of transferring this location on to the Internet, to your web pages. Those who have offices may not necessarily have an advantage as they might already have a head start or something to start with. As stated earlier, the Internet is virtual meaning your limits are basically your imagination.
This is where web design comes into place. Have you ever noticed how some places you walk into, all the staff are nicely dressed with jacket and tie, greeted with a smile and all their products are displayed very nicely. This is not done by coincidence. There is of course a reason for this. This is where the office has to, again, translate this service and quality to their website. The great part about this is that your web pages have limitless possibilities.
You may be renting space for your office or store, but you of course have not built your own building or office space. That is left up to the engineers and building contractors. On the Internet it is much the same way. You rent space from a web host provider and decide on a look or web design template which will basically make up the interior of your store or office.
Templates can range in price from nothing to no more than $80 or so. Any designs ranging in the hundreds or thousands of dollars are web designs done by individuals and who sell a design to only one customer. There is no need for any personal and complicated web designer consultations or "cost-per-hour" fees which can very easily mount to over a few hundred dollars per design when purchasing templates. You do not have to worry about unpredictable or unsatisfactory end results with other private designers as you are able to preview the design before purchasing a template. If you would prefer to be the only website to have a certain design and be willing to pay $300 minimum, then go for it. There are, however over 3 billion web pages on the Internet, so the chances of someone else having the same design you do is probably at least a few million pages away!
What some people discover, is that if you have purchased a web page editor, like FrontPage, you do not necessarily know how to design a web page yourself. There are many What You See Is What You Get editors (WYSIWYG) available to make editing pages much easier, but designing a professional website can still prove to be a difficult task. Templates can easily make this process much easier and lend a helping hand. A highly recommended web page editing program is Selida, (do a search for "Selida" on Google to download this program) which is also free. Please be warned that not all free editors are capable of editing templates. Ask the company that is selling the web templates if your software can edit the templates.
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