Web Design Choices???

A prospect contacted me about a website that they needed. She had spoken to a few companies, and had heard about something called ‘SEO’, and what about this ‘Hosting Thingy’ and ‘what’s a URL?, Oh, and they asked me how much disk space do I need in order to calculate the monthly fee!’.

I could just picture the frustration and how difficult it is for people stepping into a computer world, and how foreign it must seem. So I do my best to speak in terms that are easy to understand. My client had a sheaf of papers that she was expected to fill in, these had been sent to her by an ISP on email,  with the following mind boggling questions:

Do you need a MYSQL Database?
How much Traffic are you expecting to your site? 10 Gb, 20 GBs etc
How much Disk Space do you Need? 10 Gb, 20 GBs etc
Do many Emails do you need, and what size Mail Box do you require?
Do you require a .com or .co.za URL

None of these questions can possibly be answered by any Non Computer Literate person. And certainly not somebody who knows absolutely nothing about Hosting or Web Design. So I took the whole pile of papers, ticked and crossed a few boxes for her, and said, ‘If you wish to go with these people, then the paperwork is done, however, you don’t need to worry about this with me. I manage the entire process for you from beginning to end, AND, I’ll register the name of your website, you know, the URL name.

A big smile crossed her face, and she dropped the papers in the bin, and said ‘when can you start!’