It’s long been held that trust goes a long way in building strong long term design relationships. Building all your hopes and dreams with one designer could leave you high and dry when they up their rates after you’ve committed to a job. So how do you go about finding a trustworthy graphic design company?

Word on the street

Some of the hippest young gunslingers are to be found hanging out in the gin palaces and opium dens of the ghetto. To the uninitiated this might seem like a frightening place to look for someone trustworthy to carry out your design brief but perservere and you may get to hear about some secret design meeting going down in the backroom of some crack festooned fleapit. Welcome to the shadowy world of the design behemoths.

Playing the field

With so many unscrupulous designers hawking their shoddy services, it pays the prudent design buyer to play off these scampa among each other. For instance one designer may be offering free lollipops with every logo design. Armed with this information, approach another design agency and see what kind of sweets you might be able to get from them in order for you to place an order. Who knows by this method of going back and forth you may be able to aquire a whole sackfull of candy at no extra cost. Sweeeeet!

Get to know your designer intimately

Mixing business with pleasure can be a dangerous pastime but when you are looking to build a long term design relationship, sometimes being bedfellows makes common sense. In much the same way as you would be unlikely to stab your husband or wife in the back (unless of course you wanted to murder your spouse in which case this makes perfect sense) it stands to reason that a designer you are regularly giving one to is probably going to be more receptive to your picky demands.

Money – the route of all evil?

So far we’ve discussed the psychological neccessity of maintaining a trusting relationship between designer and client. The other, sometimes neglected aspect is a sound business trust between the two parties. Ask yourself this question: is that shifty looking graphic designer going to be dipping into your wallet as soon as you’re out of the room? If the answer is a probable yes then kick the devil into touch.

Listen to your heart

At the end of the day building up a trustful design relationship has to emerge from both parties. It’s all very well you doubting the designers sincerity and to be fair who hasn’t thought at one stage or another that a designer is ripping you off? But it’s also important to trust your gut feeling about a person. There are a couple more points that you should always be aware of. Ginger haired people although renowned for their hostile nature are 99% of the time fairly honest. Blonds will steal your last penny and leave you with some hideous design work.

eCommerce websites can be highly successful business model and offer a wide range of benefits for a primarily online Las Vegas business. In preparing for your online eCommerce business, you need to take the time to think out a basic strategy.

Can you do it yourself?

Point number one, can you build your eCommerce website yourself? Remember, even if you’re building it yourself via a pre-packaged online storefront, like Yahoo! Merchant Solutions, you need to have a basic technical aptitute. Basic programming skills are required, but importantly, you would need to look at the design and the database integration aspect.

Do you need a professional web designer to help?

If you’re not confident that you can in fact build it yourself, you need a professional web design company like Perkolate.

If you already have your own web designer ask if they do database development integration as well basic web design. Remember, even the elementary eCommerce site requires a database to work well. The site should be coded and programmed in such a way that referencing to and from the database happens without any time lag at all.

Remember to Test Your Website.

After your eCommerce website is built and the database built per your specifications, you should give your website a test run. You obviously want to test the website to see if all the functionalities is working and would also need a tester or debugger who would troubleshoot errors in your website. In the end you want to ensure that your eCommerce website is error and bug free.

Adding a blog to your website is relatively simple – there are free blogs or you can have a professional company add a blog to your existing website. The benefits to having a blog are clear. When you write articles that are of importance to a specific target market you are going after, the blog articles can be rich in keywords and your articles can be found on a google search.  This generates traffic for your blog and for your main website as well.

Blogs are quick and easy to use and you can add entries to your blog directly through a web browser. You can publish the most timely of articles about your company as well, so it is a great tool for delivering the very latest information.

For an overview of blog marketing read my article “What is Blog Marketing” on this website.

Free blogs are usually hosted on another larger website, but they are free.  Here are some links to a free blog you can create yourself to help promote your Las Vegas business:

• blogger.com
• WordPress.com
• LiveJournal.com
• Thoughts.com