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Look for the following qualities in terms of knowledge and practice: Your web designer must have an understanding of web standards. Web standards basically means that your website is going to be visible on almost all devices. You may ask which devices are they? Today, websites can be visited not only from web browsers on a pc but also browsers from handheld computers, cell phones, sony play station, HDTV’s, iPhone, and many other devices which are not compatible with ordinary web browsers. A web designer who knows standards will be able to design and develop a website for you that can be seen virtually anywhere.

You can look for online web design services. Today, you can easily choose a reliable web designer online. There are a couple of websites for you to do just that.

Your web designer should not necessarily be an expert on website advertising but he must be able to keep that in mind. He has to keep in mind that the website he is going to design and develop is going to be targeted on many levels, both general and specific.

Your web designer should also know about contemporary content management systems like Drupal, WordPress, etc. Today, CMS’ can be used for virtually any purpose and using them means that you don’t have to develop a network security system for your web site from scratch. Those content management software usually publish updates in time and you will not get into trouble worrying about security, archiving, etc.

Of course, a free-lance web designer should not be jack of all trades. It is reasonable that he or she can do your graphics on his favorite graphic editor and then put pieces together via CSS and XHTML. Don’t look after a photoshop expert for an ordinary, successful corporate website.

For complex systems on online sale, you may have to hire someone for maintaining your online business. Online sale services always need technical support. If your customers are clueless, they may choose shopping elsewhere. And those tiny but important technical details aren’t parto of your web designer’s job.

In the final analysis, choose somebody who pays attention to knowledge and practice equally. Try to feel that he loves his job and is determined to stay in the business for a long time. Pay attention to e-mail conversations. Don’t go with im and take his time.

As with the fees or prices, an average web designer who has those qualities is working for around $50 per hour. Less than that is an alert for decrease in quality. After all, you are paying for a website which you will use through all media and for a very long time.

Recently, I moved a couple of my blogs from wordpress to blogspot. The main reason for this was my hosting service. It has been nearly one month that I started using blogspot often as a blog service. Now is the time to make some comparison as well as suggestions on how to choose a host for your blog.

Well, let’s look at what you want to do with your blog. If you trust your creativity and believe that people will enjoy reading whatever you write, there are two options in my mind. You should whether choose wordpress.com or blogger.com. Here is why: both services are very easy to maintain. If you want to monetize your blog, blogspot is the way to go because it is very easy to implement adsense on your blogger blog whereas this is not difficult but impossible on wordpress.com. Wordpress.com doesn’t allow publishing ads on your blog.

If you say that you are not creative up to par, you will need tools and facilities that will make it easier for people to visit your blog and read more and then come again. And this is usability. Usability in navigation, usability in content creation etc. In this case, I recommend you a self hosted wordpress blog. For a self hosted wordpress blog, I can suggest you liquidweb.

Blogger is better than a self hosted wordpress blog based on some criteria. If you are good in coding, then I would suggest you to use Blogger because they are also very scriptable. However, with the introduction of new Blogger layout system, you have to be en experienced coder because you need to know how to “escape” some of the characters between two blocks of Blogger layout tags. This is difficult for a beginner and very prone to syntax errors. Wordpress is not the same. On any self hosted wordpress, you have thousands of different documentation in your hand and even if you are a beginner you can mess with code as much as you want without harming your blog too much.

And this is needed for any blogger because there is always the need for customization. You may want to display ads only on certain posts in certain categories on your blog or you may want some archive pages to look different than ordinary pages in your design. Then a self hosted wordpress is the way to go.

Are you concentrated enough to create original content for your blog or website? Creating original content is difficult, not because people aren’t creative enough but because people are bombarded with a standard perception. Many talented people set up a blog and then go research “big blogs” and look for what they do. This usually leads to procrastination and prolongs the process of a new, creative blog. People look at famous blogs and say “yes, I should look similar to them”.

This is far from being original. This may sound naive to you but you are already original because each individual on this planet is unique enough to create unique, original content. However, there is this conformity surrounding us only to prevent us from creating the original content that in fact we can create easily.

Most people get stuck with blogging just because they are too busy with visual design, web standards, what other people are posting, etc. If you want to create original content and stay away from the crowd (which is a good thing because it’s a professional way and success is a higher probability) then you should pay less attention to what the blogosphere is mostly concentrated on.

If you take the time to have a different look, a different perspective on many famous blogs, you can see that they did not fall into the trap of conformity. Most of the time, they are very bold and audacious. Of course many corporate blogs do not fall into this category. I am talking about individual work. If you look at the blogs of weblogs inc, you cannot see this original content and approach because there is the anxiety of saving investments and this makes them far from being original and conform to norms that they have in mind.

Individual blogging is not bound with such norms. Take PostSecret as an example. It is a very original blog. Yet it doesn’t look like professional to many people because they are accustomed to see blogs like engadget and this is what they find and count as professional. So, originality doesn’t depend on professionalism. PostSecret is very famous, it gets many hits, many unique visitors. Because it is an original peace of work.

Moreover, PostSecret is on Blogspot, which is a fact many people with a naive realism would argue that this is not a professional look.

Well, if you want to create original content and think that you should have a blog similar to many famous blogs out there, think again.