Blooming Style
For Inspirational Garden Designs

Free Web Design Service for Garden Designers

While it is easy enough to create web pages these days (e.g. you can save a Word document and save it as HTML), getting a professional looking site can be more of a challenge. From late June and all of July, I will be offering a FREE service for garden designers based in the UK and Ireland who support this web site.

What do I provide ?

You get a set of web pages that you can have hosted by any web hosting company you want. I can also hold the pages in a sub-directory on this site for free. These pages will consist of purely static content, which means that it will not contain an application (e.g. NO login, NO forms, and NO shopping basket functionality).

 

I can incorporate some image swapping (useful for swapping pictures for viewing your portfolios), but I won't incorporate any other dynamic content because it can involve a lot more work. I won't create any Macromedia Flash® (animation and slide shows) and any special graphics and images for you. I expect you to supply all your own images.

 

I will try to give you a professional looking web site that I hope you can be proud to show off.

 

I deal with all requests in a queue and will try to deal with each as quickly as possible. If I can't deal with your request within 2 or 3 weeks, I will try to let you know when I can reasonably work on your web site.

What do I need from you ?

You need to think about what you want to achieve with your web site. A good web site should have a consistent theme or appearance, several web pages, text and pictures.

 

A good place to start is to view a number of well designed pages. The Open Source Web Design is an excellent resource. Take note of the design and designer of a scheme you like. Alternatively, send me the address of a web site you like the look of. You can specify your own colours. Please send a file with a sample of the colours (e.g. in a Word, Excel, or other common file format file).

 

Once you've decided on a scheme for your site, you need to decide on the actual pages and content. It helps if you create one or more documents (e.g. a Word document for each page) and specify clearly what you want. Decide what you want to call each page and what it contains. The following are some standard pages that many web sites use;

• Index or Home page (front page)
• Portfolio (images / descriptions of your work)
• Contact Information (with an e-mail link)
• News (containing a section you might want to update regularly)
• Links (if you want to promote other sites)
• About or Terms (more information about you and your business, terms of business, type of work, and prices)

Don't forget to include some pictures or images of gardens, design work, plants/flowers, features, and art work. These all help to add colour, break up your text, and cheer up your web site.

I can only create 6 or less pages for free. A page should be no more than what can reasonably fit in a sheet of A4, but ideally it should be just enough to fit on the average screen (about half an A4).

Finally, send me an e-mail with all attachments to webdesign@bloomingstyle.co.uk

Note: if all your attachments add up to 5MB or more, please send me your files in separate e-mails. There is a limit to the size that the e-mail protocol can handle.

What do you get ?

Firstly, I can put up your web pages within this web site for you to review. It will probably be www.BloomingStyle.co.uk/TestSite/YourName. I will send you a link to it via e-mail. I can also zip them all up and e-mail them to you, if that is your preference.

I hope you are happy with the web pages I've constructed for you. If you want to adjust it in any way, I am happy to oblige (but can only spend a limited amount of time on each request). If you wish, I can host your web pages under a sub-directory on this site (i.e. www.BloomingStyle.co.uk/YourName).

If you want to buy a dedicated domain name to park your web pages under (for example www.fabGardenDesign.co.uk or www.YourName.com), you need to have your site hosted. There are thousands of companies out there, I'm afraid that I cannot recommend a specific one. There is a lot of competition and prices vary considerably.

 

Some hosting companies provide free hosting. However, be warned that these services often place annoying banners, pop-ups, and other ads on your web pages (that is how they make money). These ads can be annoying and they don't look terribly professional. Apart from that, some free hosts might only provide sub-domains or sub-directories -- so no custom domain names.

 

Also check out your Internet Service Provider for special deals, they sometimes include hosting as part of your package. A simple shared web hosting package (also called virtual hosting) is sufficient for putting up static pages.

I may be able to provide hosting of your own domain in the future. If there is enough interest, I can negotiate a good deal with a UK based hosting company. So if you are interested, let me know.

My Motives

My motives are very simple... I would like to get as many designers to support this new venture as I can, but there is a little bit more to it than that:

• A good web site is an important marketing tool. I genuinely want to promote garden designers. An elegant web site gives you that edge.
• I want to improve my ranking in search engines like Google by having lots of sites link to this web site. I will place a very discrete link at the bottom of your pages that links to this site. I can also link to your web site from here if you let me know your domain name (e.g. www.yourname.co.uk). Both this web site and your web site will score higher with search engines.