Step 4. Do I Need to Hire a Web Design Service?

I design all my own Web pages. It shows, probably.

I suffer from some reverse snobbery here. I'm in the content business (I'm a professional writer), and I hate it when businesses put together Web pages that are very pretty but not particularly useful. I've seen people spend a lot of money on fancy design and throw in content as an afterthought.

But you can have both, of course. There are a lot of ways you can go with this. You can do it all yourself. You can get someone to help you in the beginning, and then take over form there. Or you can take a hands-off approach, where you hand over text and photos to someone and ask them to put them into the Web page each time.

If you have kids in middle school or later, you may find that they'll have no trouble mastering the necessary skills, and can explain things to you, though they'll sigh and roll their eyes a lot.

Actually creating a Web page that will display more or less the way you wanted it to is really quite simple, and we'll talk about that in the next step. Making it look spiffy and beautiful and high-tech and expensive and artistic is a lot harder. I think the trend right now is towards simpler Web pages, though.

On to the Next Step.

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